Senate v. House

In the great running fight between the Congress and the President, the House had struck a foul blow. Last week the Senate tried to make amends for that blow.

Fortnight ago the House attached to an appropriations bill a rider stipulating that no part of the funds provided therein should be used to pay the salaries of three men called "radicals" by the Dies committee. In effect, unable to have-at the President, the House was trying to knock off three small-fry New Dealers. One was Robert Morss Lovett, 72, Government Secretary of the Virgin Islands, oldtime liberal, war horse of pacifism, longtime English professor at the University of Chicago.* The other two were FCC employes: Psychology Professor Goodwin B. Watson of Columbia and William E. Dodd Jr., son of the late Ambassador to Germany.

Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes testified before a Senate appropriations subcommittee. He spoke only for Mr. Lovett, an employe of his Interior Department. But the principles he championed applied to the cases of all three. He reminded the Congress that the Constitution laid down a regular procedure of impeachment, by which Congress may rid the government of misbehaving officials. For Congress to short-circuit the Constitution by withholding funds for an official's salary was, he declared, an encroachment on the rights of the Executive. In this case it was also nothing less than an unconstitutional condemnation without judicial trial.

To document the latter charge, Mr. Ickes pointed out that the House (Kerr) subcommittee which originated the rider ousting and besmirching the three officials had: 1) examined Mr. Lovett in secret session, for only two hours, on only one day's notice; 2) supplied him with no advance specification of the charges to be brought against him; 3) not permitted him to bring counsel, or to summon witnesses in his behalf; 4) provided neither him, nor the Interior Department, nor the Congress with a transcript.

After these jarring jabs, Battler Ickes swung a haymaker. "I am shocked, Gentlemen," he cried, "that a committee of this Congress should undertake to discharge from Government employment a loyal American citizen on the basis of two statements, one by a woman under Federal indictment for sedition, and the other by a Fascist sympathizer." He proceeded to point out that the Kerr committee's lists of "subversive" organizations with which Mr. Lovett was accused of associating were identical with lists which appeared in the neurotic Mrs. Elizabeth Dilling's The Red Network, and in the Dies Committee testimony of one Walter S. Steele of the Christian American Crusade.

Convinced, the Senate voted out the rider, went to conference with the House determined not to yield.

* Remembered by thousands of schoolboys as co-author of the long-lived Moody & Lovett's A History of English Literature.

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