Evening Post. TUESDAY, JUNE 15, 1937. A DOUBLE-BARRELLED SHOT

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 140, 15 June 1937, Page 8

Evening Post. TUESDAY, JUNE 15, 1937. A DOUBLE-BARRELLED SHOT

TJie vehement opposition of the most unsparing critics of President Roosevelt's Judiciary Plan seems to be equalled if not exceeded by the denunciatory terms of the report of die Senate Committee. As there is (at time of writing) no mentidn of a minority report, it is a little difficult, at this distance, to reconcile the bludgeon terms of the report with the cabled statement (May 18) that the decision of the Committee to report unfavourably on the plan was carried by only two votes (10-8). The Committee now finds that the President's proposed method of dealing with the United States Supreme Court is an "abandonment of constitutional principle," and, as such, it is "needless"; it is also "futile"; further, it is "utterly dangerous." If the Committee had resurrected the judicial anathema on something else —"a fraud,, a share, and a delusion"—it could not have been more merciless in its 'adjectival abhorrence of a Presidential abomination. But the moving finger that, clearly in wrath, wrote the anti-Roosevelt adjectives, hurried1 on without remorse to inscribe an even more aggressive appeal to the Senate. That supreme1 body, the tamer of President Woodrow Wilson, is asked to defeat. the proposal "so emphatically that its parallel shall never again be presented to a free American people." .: '- Judging by the jCommittee's voting division on approval of the proposal —10 against,'B for—a discreet report might have been expected. One might have expected the Committee to dissemble its love for the Presir dent's plan, of "packing the Court," but not to kick the whole proposal downstairs ,with such studied violence. The terms of the Committee's appeal to the Seriate are such that unless a President is like a corporation (which has neither a body to be kicked, nor a soul to be damned) he must feel intensely the existence of such a document on the national records. The Senate now is also placed in a position of extreme difficulty. The Senate.becomes,a kind of mighty atom with its positive and its negative particles revolving round its nucleus, the Committee. The nucleus has generated so much unexpected heat that the positives. and the negatives in the Senate atom must now feel highly (and perhaps uncomfortably) energised. Will this powerful electric spark make the positives less •positive and the negatives more negative? Will it swing. the waverers to the negative side and so defeat the abhorred influence inherent in the Judiciary Plan? On will some factor external to the atom itself (the factor of party control) be strong enough to carry the President's denounced proposal through the Senate? If so, what will the historian' of the future write concerning Senate approval of something which its own Committee has pronounced so venomous? This double-barrelled shot—one for the Judiciary Plan, one for its author—can at least be taken for an assurance that a new, sharp'note of opposition to the President has appeared. It has been of gradual growth; what its future development will be can only be conjectured. No decision of the Senate, whether for or against, will alter the impression that the President's Supreme Court,/ proposal has 'done more to disturb thinking men, of the non-party and non-sectional class, than anything else he has fathered.^ His conlribtu-J tions to economic cxperimentalMbjii} do not greatly alarm that class t>f thinker. It knows in a general way that economic experimentation, is world-wide, and that America %as been rather laggard. An attack/ on American economic conventions/was not unexpected; but the attacfc on the Supreme Court, in its present form, was quite unexpected, anjfl was not outlined by Mr. RoosevelWwhen, in the 1936 election campaign, he presented to the electors th 4; proposals by which he secured1, their votes. Of course, even now,/ and in face of the Committee's adjectives, the President may win in th/e Senate. But will his own cause, in/ the long run, be better served by+victory or by defeat? To many h<; seems to be on the brink of whattfmay prove to be a historic blunder.4 To some it is "utterly dangerous^''; to others it is "futile"; and to veriy many more it is at least "needless.") Long ago, it seems, the Brains Tijust was disbanded. But here was/fa case where it might have advised/feuccessfully, if negative!}