Editorial: ‘You’ll like it’
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Background of news –
Filibuster
By Editorial Research Reports
The issue involved in a filibuster is majority rule vs. minority rights. The New York Herald-Tribune calls the present filibuster against the anti-poll tax bill “striking against the Senate.” The filibusterers contend that minorities have certain inalienable rights which even a majority must not ride over rough-shod. The majority retorts that the Supreme Court will protect all minority rights which are really valid.
The filibusterers come back by pointing out that if the majority really feels strongly on the legislation in question, it has ways and means of breaking the filibuster.
Since 1917, as a result of the filibuster against the bill to arm merchant ships against German submarines, the Senate has been able to break a filibuster by applying Cloture. After Cloture is applied to a pending measure, this becomes the unfinished business of the Senate, to the exclusion of all other business, until the Senate has finally disposed of it. Thereafter no senator may speak for more than one hour – no new amendment may be offered except by unanimous consent – no dilatory amendments or motions are in order – all points of order must be decided without debate.
A two-thirds vote by senators present is necessary to apply Cloture. In 1937, southern senators filibustered against the anti-lynching bill which had been passed by the House. Two motions were made for Cloture; both failed to achieve even a majority. The first Cloture motion was opposed by 51 percent of the Democrats and 92 percent of the Republicans; the second, by 47 percent of the Democrats and 77 percent of the Republicans.
The Democrats accused the Republicans of playing politics because, although most Republicans ostensibly favored the anti-lynching bill, they would not vote for Cloture to bring it to a vote. The Republicans accused the administration leaders of playing politics because, although they insisted that only southerners opposed the bill, they would not turn on pressure either to break the filibuster or to put Cloture across. At all events, after six weeks the Senate yielded to the filibuster, and laid the anti-lynching bill aside.
The truth is that almost all senators are loath to see Cloture applied. The Senate zealously cherishes its right of unlimited debate, and no senator knows when he may want to avail himself of it. No motion for Cloture has been made since 1937. Altogether, since 1917 only 13 Cloture motions have been made, and only four of these have been successful – Treaty of Versailles, 1919; World Court, 1926; banking bill, 1927; prohibition reorganization, 1927.
Past Senate filibusters were apt to occur in the biennial short session. The biennial long session usually would end in the late spring or early summer, and no filibuster could hope to succeed for six months. So the adoption of the 20th Amendment, abolishing the short session, was expected to end filibusters; it was not foreseen that Congress would meet in regular session throughout the year.
The present filibuster is using such obstructionist tactics as incessant demands for quorums. Irrelevant debate was another favorite filibustering method of the past; in 1903, Sen. “Pitchfork Bill” Tillman of South Carolina threatened to read all of Byron’s Childe Harold aloud unless the Senate voted to pay a claim of his state.
Truce fought in filibuster on poll taxes
Row continues in Senate with denunciation of Majority Leader
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Halsey Day proclaimed
Elizabeth, New Jersey –
Mayor James T. Kirk today proclaimed next Friday Adm. Halsey Day, in honor of VAdm. William F. Halsey Jr., commander of the U.S. naval force that won a smashing victory over the Japanese fleet in the Solomon Islands. Adm. Halsey was born in Elizabeth.
MacArthur’s fliers down 18 enemy planes in day
Americans and Australians continue advance toward Buna with strong air support
By Brydon Taves, United Press staff writer
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Millett: Let husband decide own Army choice
Wife should refrain from expressing herself in public
By Ruth Millett
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Pegler: Post-war immigration
By Westbrook Pegler
New York –
Discussion of our plans for the great new world of the future seems slightly premature, not to say cocky, at the present writing, but, assuming the Germans presently get another bellyful and quit again and that the Japs are all but annihilated, which seems to be Ambassador Grew’s minimum for victory over them, then what about post-war immigration to this country by the peoples of other lands?
I think that when it is all over, the American people will still have sense enough to exclude wholesale immigration of those whom Kipling, in his candid arrogance, called the lesser breeds, because experience has shown they can work rings around Americans, both white and Negro, and live on less, and that they tend to depress the American living standard and live mysteriously apart from us among us.
It is a fact that we had Chinese troubles in California and elsewhere in the West before we had a Japanese problem, and it is not insulting these peoples but, if you like, complimenting them to say they can get by on less food, sleep, recreation and comfort and produce more work than we can. When you come down to it, that is the same as saying they are better men than we are, which admission might take some of the pain out of exclusion.
But are we going to open the doors to the peoples of Europe without regard for their politics, past performances or occupational talents? Because, if so, we shall be trying to digest a mess of fishhooks.
Many doubtful cases let in
These people will include most of the smart and nasty agitators of the continent who did much to provoke Fascism in Italy and the idle, sedentary parasites who flocked to France when the heat became too great in their own countries and nagged the Frenchmen to distraction. The fact is that we have many of them among us now, telling us what is wrong with the only country on earth in which they are safe, and wanting us to do things their way.
In our great, humane generosity, we bent our own laws out of shape in the last rush before the war and, because we were unwilling to risk excluding genuine victims of racial, religious and political persecution, let in many doubtful cases who were just as cruel and conspiratorial as the Fascists and Nazis.
Not all refugees are victims of injustice, although all of them say they are. Some are primarily refugees from the exasperation of their decent, orderly neighbors in the homeland who finally got fed up with their ceaseless troublemaking, their defamatory treatment of all who disagreed with them and their assumption of an intellectual status which forbade them to engage in common work.
Let’s make immigration selective
If we must have immigration in the great new world of the future, then, certainly, it should be selective according to a catalog of talents in which we may be deficient, and a record of useful work should weigh more than a record of stoning the cops or organizing ructions in the streets.
Would that tend to exclude ideas, then?
If so, that would be no new principle in our immigration practice, for we are hostile to Nazism and Fascism and have taken a position, somewhat shaky, to be sure, that communism is equally detestable and dangerous to the American government.
No political idea now current in Europe offers any improvement on the government of the United States, and the only economic ideas that Europe has to offer us are the ideas of bankruptcy and state control of most private property and state possession by confiscation of the rest.
It is an expression of despair and defeatism to say that we have exhausted the possibilities of the American way and must now turn back to Europe at the worst stage of Europe’s history for novelties with which to improve the American way of life.
Open the doors wide again and we will have here the sort of journalism, already noticeable, and the same conspiratorial, international kind of domestic politics which contributed so much to the hell of Europe today.
Smashing the Axis
Ford’s experiment save men, time and machines by casting processes
By Charles T. Lucey, Pittsburgh Press special writer
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Stalingrad’s defenders send thanks to U.S. women for warm garments
Scarfs, hoods, sweaters and mittens knitted by Americans
New York –
From the frontlines of shattered, burning Stalingrad, where German attacks are fought from block to block, American women all over the country have recently received letters from Red Army men, thanking them for gifts of warm winter garments.
Hundreds of wool scarfs, hoods, sweater and mittens were knitted by American women volunteers. They were made last summer at club meetings, bridge parties, during vacations, lunch hours and even on subways and buses going to work.
The gifts arrived in time to bring warm comfort to the fighters as the dread Russian winter settled its icy grip on the front.
Russian soldiers and ambulance girls, upon receiving the parcels, look first of all to see whether there is a note or a letter of some kind, according to the New York Russian Relief office, which recently received the “thank you” letters by transocean Clipper.