The Word From Washington
The Word from Washington Ask any member of the House or Senate why he is seen so rarely on his chamber's floor and he will patiently explain that the most important work of Congress is transacted...
...Naturally, he invited Representative Rarick to be the leadoff witness...
...Our elected School Board lacks the power of the purse...
...Chisholm—to the dinner, though none has yet been chosen for membership...
...The slogan is, obviously, something of an overstatement...
...The Word from Washington Ask any member of the House or Senate why he is seen so rarely on his chamber's floor and he will patiently explain that the most important work of Congress is transacted in committee...
...On the Senate side, the Armed Services Committee barred its doors at seventy-nine per cent of its meetings...
...Congressional Quarterly, which recently published its annual survey of committee secrecy, found that while the percentage of closed sessions dropped slightly in 1971 from 1970, it was comparable to—or higher than—the percentage for previous years...
...So we don't think the Senator and the Congresswoman are making a great sacrifice...
...This is true—and it makes it all the more disturbing that so much of the committees' work is done behind closed doors, shielded from scrutiny by the press and by the public...
...One aim of the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970, which went into effect last year, was to encourage committees to hold more public meetings...
...In fact, their greater problem may arise the day the Gridiron decides to open its doors...
...The Appropriations Committee, which decides how our tax dollars are to be spent, excluded the public from ninety-two per cent of its sessions...
...Well, it's a thought...
...The Gridiron is the Capital's most exclusive journalists' club...
...The Bureau of the Census reported that the average Washingtonian paid $517 in local taxes during fiscal 1970 —considerably more than the nationwide average of $427 in state and local taxes...
...The numbers now are recorded on drivers' licenses, bank accounts, insurance policies, credit applications, library cards, and most of the other pieces of paper on which the lives of citizens are folded, mutilated, and spindled by public and private bureaucrats...
...The Congressman offered his own alternative: "Remove all people from the Federal District who are not here on Government business and resettle them in areas of the country that have sparse population and living room...
...Residents of only three states—New York, Hawaii, and California—paid non-Federal taxes at a rate higher than the District's...
...D.C.—Last Colony," proclaim the bumper-strips distributed by the League of Women Voters...
...Residents of Washington, Rarick thoughtfully testified, have "no more entitlement in logic or morality to home rule than . . . the Navajo reservation located in Arizona...
...To get the ball rolling, we speculate here and now that once the doors are barred, members engage in unspeakable abominations...
...Gentlemen of the Gridiron Club," Ms...
...What will they use for an alibi then...
...that they don ballet slippers and padded jackets to dance The Red Detachment of Women...
...The House Ways and Means Committee, which writes the nation's tax laws, met in secret sixty-two per cent of the time...
...Your immature correspondent and his fellow citizens (to use the word loosely) of the Capital of the Free World recently received a painful reminder that the burden of taxation without representation is a heavy one...
...The District of Columbia is merely one of the last colonies...
...For our part, we prefer another plan—one that was proposed long ago, but has never received the attention it merits: Why not place the District of Columbia— a non-self-governing territory—under the jurisdiction of the United Nations Trusteeship Council...
...To all intents and purposes, our community is governed day to day by a self-perpetuating cabal of Southern Congressmen who dominate the House Committee on the District of Columbia...
...Senator McGovern wrote, "I prefer not to attend so long as the Gridiron Club continues its policy of excluding women members...
...It didn't work...
...Among others, it excludes women—or has for the past eighty-seven years...
...Our "Mayor" and our "City Council" are appointed by the President of the United States with the advice and consent of the Senate, in which we are not represented...
...If any committee wants to prove us wrong, it merely has to let the people in to see for themselves...
...Half the meetings of the Public Works Committee were closed, and forty-seven per cent of the meetings of the Finance Committee...
...She charged that the "absence of women and minorities in the Gridiron Club is symbolic of the racism and sexism which pervades the news industry...
...Its 750,000 residents, a substantial majority of whom are black, are—like the natives of Micronesia, Angola, and other surviving imperial fiefdoms—not yet deemed to have attained the measure of maturity required for the exercise of responsible self-government...
...Except Senator George McGovern and Representative Shirley Chisholm, who have publicly declined their invitations...
...We confess that we went to a Gridiron dinner once, and found that the entertainment consisted of "skits" in which aging newspapermen impersonated aging politicians singing "satyri-cal" ditties to the tune of numbers left over from the old Lucky Strike Hit Parade...
...certainly the people of those states would benefit from close association with the people of the caliber of those in the district...
...Our elected "Congressman" is a non-voting delegate to the House of Representatives...
...Federal taxes, of course, fall with impartial inequity on residents of all the states as well as the Capital...
...The Senate Finance Committee, we were told last month, is considering a plan to issue a Social Security number to every child when he enters school at the age of six...
...There are, of course, ways of promoting even greater efficiency—and they will probably soon be tried...
...Representative John Dowdy, Texas Democrat, who is appealing an eighteen-month jail sentence and a $25,000 fine for bribery, conspiracy, and perjury, is one of the breed...
...For that reason, its dinners were picketed in 1970 and 1971 by an ad hoc group called Journalists for Professional Equality...
...It's a wonder no one has thought of it before...
...It is unfortunate that the cost of relocating these exploited people to the sparsely populated areas like Montana, South Dakota, Minnesota, or Kansas is prohibitive...
...The Gridiron couldn't get us to go again if it invited all of Women's Lib and threw in the Gay Liberation Movement for good measure...
...We can suggest one way—perhaps the only way—to persuade Congress that it ought to conduct the public's business in public: Enterprising journalists could begin concocting imaginative dispatches on what actually takes place when committees meet in secrecy...
...They are mere "squatters on this Federal reservation" who might, if accorded the franchise, install a government of Black Muslims...
...Social Security numbers, which once served the primitive purpose of identifying Social Security accounts, are rapidly becoming America's ubiquitous, all-purpose ID tags...
...Well, they won't be missing much...
...That way, at least, the colonial regime that holds us in thrall would be compelled to file periodic reports on the steps it is taking to advance the health, education, and welfare of its unwilling wards, and to prepare them for the responsibilities of self-government...
...Chairman Russell B. Long, Louisiana Democrat, is also pondering the possibility of fingerprinting every applicant for a Social Security card...
...What makes the tax load particularly onerous to those of us condemned to live here is the fact that we have no voice whatever in levying the taxes or determining how they are to be spent...
...Representative John L. McMillan, South Carolina Democrat, the chairman of the District Committee, is currently conducting languorous hearings on various proposals to give the Capital a measure of home rule— none of which he has any intention of allowing to reach the House floor...
...Come to think of it, someone did...
...that they shoot dope and guzzle bathtub gin...
...Another is Representative John R. Rar-ick, Louisiana Democrat, who rarely lets a day slip by without inserting his racist fulminations—or someone else's -—into the Congressional Record...
...I personally think," he says, "that everyone ought to have fingerprints on file...
...I don't think he'd go to Canada to evade the draft," says Tuck...
...that they hold choral readings of the works of Henry Miller...
...Last year, House, Senate, and Joint committees held a total of 64,231 meetings, and 23,720 of them —thirty-seven per cent—were closed...
...Chisholm replied, "guess who's not coming to dinner...
...This year, the club broke precedent by inviting about a dozen women—including Ms...
...To prevent confusion, for example, every man, woman, and child could be required to have his number tattooed on his forearm...
...The Foreign Relations Committee, whose chairman, Senator J. W. Fulbright of Arkansas, has been an eloquent critic of Executive Branch secrecy, held forty-three per cent of its meetings in secret...
...Almost half of the Judiciary Committee's meetings were closed...
...Potomacus...
...The Gridiron Club will be holding its annual dinner in a few days, and everybody who is anybody in Washington will be there...
...Dick Tuck, the California political prankster whose legendary exploits include the covert insertion of anti-Nixon slogans in the fortune cookies served at a Republican fund-raising dinner, has come up with the definitive statement on the tantalizing question of Senator Edward M. Kennedy's availability as a Presidential candidate...
Vol. 36 • April 1972 • No. 4
