CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT
Congress And The President NO ONE who reads in "Mem Kampf" Adolf Hitler's bitter, almost hysterical attack on the delays, disputes, and lack of responsibility of the democratic lawmaking process...
...Such a step could easily have led, especially in view of the temper of Congress after the Presidential tongue-lashing, to a decision to wreck the whole Renegotiation Law...
...Meeting in New York last week, the American Association of School Administrators heard some sensible talks on the subject from top-flight educational experts, including Dean William F. Russell of Teachers College, Columbia University, and Dr...
...Standing against the majority of the Senate Finance Committee were four Senators, Scott W. Lucas of Illinois, David I. Walsh of Massachusetts, and Tom Connally of Texas, all Democrats, and Robert M. La Follette, Jr., Wisconsin Progressive...
...It was their courageous minority report which awakened public opinion to the danger of weakening the Renegotiation Act and led to the decisive action of the Senate in rejecting the crippling amendments...
...Studebaker was in hearty accord...
...Certainly we are in no position to play the role of educational messiahs...
...It should rouse itself at once from absorption in factional strife, assert its independence from White House control, and drive selfish pressure groups from the temple of government...
...The Barkley-Roosevelt tiff (See The Last Column) has heightened our concern over the indiscriminate smearing of the legislative branch of our government by men and organizations that should know better but that seem to have allowed their frayed war nerves and their impatience for quick and perfect decisions to trap them into making a devil of the Lawmakers and a saint of the Leader...
...John W. Studebaker, United States Commissioner of Education...
...As Dr...
...La Follette, the Senate's most relentless critic of war profiteering and inadequate taxation...
...Some of them, however, have clung to the hope that we could export our democracy in text-books and through a general supervision and policing of the schools of Germany and Japan in the postwar period...
...It is not surprising, therefore, that all four of the Senators who stood against crippling the law when it was before the Finance Committee voted to override the President's tax bill veto last week, including Sen...
...Dean Russell was realistic in warning that foreign peoples would bitterly resent interference with their schools...
...A powerful campaign to scuttle the Renegotiation Law, or failing outright repeal, to cripple it, was conducted in Congress when the tax bill was under consideration...
...Who are we, people of the United States, to set ourselves up to teach the other peoples of the world ?" he asked...
...Charles Beard, dean of American historians, points out so graphically in his article on Page 1 this week, Congress, no less than the executive, must modernize its procedures, eliminate factionalism and negationism, and become a more responsible and responsive arm of democracy if America is to be kept from being pushed into the "march of despotism...
...Congress And The President NO ONE who reads in "Mem Kampf" Adolf Hitler's bitter, almost hysterical attack on the delays, disputes, and lack of responsibility of the democratic lawmaking process can fail to be disturbed by the current assault on the delays, disputes, and lack of responsibility of our Congress...
...There can be no denying the fact that some of the individual acts of Congress and some of the acts of individual Congressmen have done much to weaken public respect for the legislative branch of government...
...Dr...
...Happily, however, this dangerous notion has been subjected of late to hard-headed analysis by some of the nation's outstanding educators, and their judgments amply confirm the conclusions published in many articles in The Progressive, notably the recent one by Prof...
...Failure to override the President's veto of the tax bill would have reopened the whole question of amending, weakening, crippling, or destroying the Renegotiation Law...
...Roosevelt, in his turn, should abandon his plan to make Congress the scapegoat for home-front failures in order to strengthen his reelection chances, and must surround himself with abler, more progressive advisers if he is to continue to entrust assistants with the direction of domestic affairs while he continues engrossed in global politics...
...Roosevelt to modify his tone for the present, but it becomes clearer every day that his absorption in foreign affairs has caused him to lose touch with the people, the press, and the Congress and to rely more and more on the advice of an inept palace guard...
...Now no one, of course, questions the President's right to veto a bill, and least of all an inadequate tax bill, but to accompany the veto of six months of exhaustive work on a complicated tax bill with harsh impugning of motives calculated to expose Congress to scorn and ridicule strikes us as too dangerous a game to be played at a time when ours is one of the two or three free legislative bodies left in a world gone totalitarian...
...Lucas, generally an unswerving supporter of the President, and Sen...
...Stephen Corey...
...A Fortress Preserved THE decision of Congress to override the President's veto of the tax bill guarantees, for at least the remainder of 1944, the continued operation of the vitally significant Renegotiation Act...
...Thomas L. Stokes, one of the most respected of the Washington correspondents, reports, for instance, that "it has been obvious since his annual message to Congress in January that he proposed henceforth to make an issue between himself and Congress...
...rT",HIS defense of Congress must not be con-strued as an endorsement of all, or nearly all, of its recent actions...
...The Barkley blow-up may require Mr...
...Roosevelt, it seems, is determined to keep %live the strife between the legislative and executive branches of government and to harness that tragic disagreement for campaign purposes...
...The U. S. Commissioner of Education struck a keynote which American educators should adopt as their own when he asserted that the most influential role of the United States would be in setting an example for the world by making education an instrument for preserving and strengthening democracy at home...
...It is this law which has enabled the Federal Government to recapture for the Treasury more than five billion dollars in excess war profits which contractors had salted away, ostensibly out of reach of the regular tax laws...
...Sensible Advice ' I 'HE realization that we of America cannot ram our way of life into others at the point of a bayonet has gained steadily among the more realistic of our postwar planners...
...There is grave danger, Dean Russell warned, that while America is embarked on a program of educational imperialism, "we will become an island of reaction in a world of progress...
Vol. 8 • March 1944 • No. 10
