OPENING GUN

Evening Post, Volume CXVIII, Issue 36, 11 August 1934, Page 8

OPENING GUN

AMERICAN ELECTIONS

THE .REPUBLICAN LEADER

SUBSERVIENCE OF CONGRESS

(From "Tho Post's" Representative.)

.NEW YORK, July 2a,

The opening gun'of tho campaign for the Congressional elections in November, fired by ■ tho newly-elected Chairman of the Republican Parly (Mr. Henry P. Fletcher) lays a withering barrage of condemnation on thu action of the Democrats in surrendering to the President the law-making powers of Congress.

"Clothed with unprecedented authority, the President has, in. turn, delegated tho control of tlic livelihood, business, and property of the individual American citizen to a vast maze of theorising, meddling, directing, spending, lending, and borrowing agencies, lettered on the Soviet mode," says Mr. Fletcher. This, in defiance of the first Article of the Constitution, which says: "All legislative powers herein granted are vested in Congress." With biting satire, Mr. Fletcher urges that "a rubber stamp, lying down," bo the design for a special medal, approved by President Roosevelt, for each member of the current Congress. Laws wero passed which Congressmen had not read or understood, and could not now explain—"laws, prepared for them by the alphabetical bureaux of the President, and passed under White House pressure by the aid and agency of gag, stop-debate rules. Tho power to levy taxes on a free people, zealously guarded by Anglo-Saxons since it was wrested from , King John at Uuimymedc,i has been transferred by Congress to tho Executive," whose authority is now coinparablo only that possessed by Mussolini and Hitler." PRESIDENT'S ARRAY OP POWERS.

iThe President\ imposing array of powers, as interpreted by tho llepublican Leader, axe: —;

1. To fix the gold content of the dollar at between 50 and 60 per cent, of its former value1, and this after the Administration had commandeered all tho gold in tho country in the hands of the people and tho banks, and had repudiated tho solemn and specific promiso of tho United States to pay its obligations in gold, coinage of a fixed standard.

2. To adopt bi-metallism

3. To print £600,000,000 of paper money to retire Federal debt or finance emorgoucy expenditures. 4. To fix prices of farm and factory products, and to control their output and marketing. ■ *

5. To uso Government funds to buy farm lands, purchase factories for uso by the unemployed, to make loans to private industries, and to control tho capital market. 6. To control, through the N.E.A., prices, wages, hours of labour, and tho expansion of all industries. 7. To incur billions of dollars of debt, and to expend the • proceeds; unrestrained by tho detailed, specific appropriations which have* ever been necessary as a curb upon tho extravagance and profligacy of spending departments. - 8. To distribute public funds ; at his discretion to certain groups of the population, and so open the door to tho debauching of the electorate.

9. To appoint hordes of civil employees, unhampered by Civil Service laws, and thus build up, at the expense of the taxpayer, a huge political machine.