Priest v. Priest

By last week virtually everything that could be said about President Roosevelt's Supreme Court plan had been said, and Congressmen had settled down to a stretch of chewing over the arguments, jockeying for position. Theme of most talk was the chance of a compromise, possibly by Constitutional amendment. Senator Borah introduced a proposal to rewrite the 14th Amendment, define its "due process" clause as applying only to governmental procedure, thus 'giving States free rein for social and economic experiments. Nobody expected that to satisfy Federalist Franklin Roosevelt. Some optimists still hoped that the whole issue might be dodged by means of the Sumners-McCarran bill, permitting Supreme Court Justices to retire at 70 on full pay (TIME, Feb. 22), which the Senate last week passed by 76-10-4, and the President promptly signed.

High point of a dull week in the Court battle came when Baltimore's Catholic Review, official newsorgan of blunt Archbishop Michael Joseph Curley, pitched into Catholic University's liberal Monsignor John Augustine Ryan for endorsing the President's plan. "Monsignor Ryan has a Fascist, dictatorial mind," roared the archiepiscopal spokesman. "He wants sycophants and cowards (not all of them in Congress are sycophants and cowards) to give President Roosevelt power not only to control the Supreme Court of the United States in his own Administration but until the Crack of Doom. Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler and [Largo] Caballero, Monsignor Ryan, would make pikers of you."

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