Editorial: Some are counted, some aren’t
They are being counted – those young Americans on the warships, in the air, on the beaches of the Marshall Islands in this greatest of our battles with the Japs.
They are being counted – those young Americans who press forward today against the Germans’ fire, over the hills and plains of Italy, on to Rome.
Their comrades have been counted on a hundred bloody battlefields, from Attu to Bataan to Guadalcanal to Tunisia – and white crosses mark the places where they stood when they were counted.
But some of their representatives in Congress, trustees of the government for which those young men are fighting and dying, don’t want to be counted – not even at $10,000 a year.
Today the Congressmen are voting on the question of whether the Armed Forces shall be permitted to vote in the next election by state ballots or by federal ballots. But they are not deciding this issue by a record roll call, which would provide a public count of where each Congressman stands.
They are deciding it by a “teller vote,” that being a parliamentary device by which lawmakers register their will anonymously – to the end that when election time comes constituents will not know where they stood or how they were counted.
Gen. MacArthur said:
Only those who are ready to die are fit to live.
Only those Congressmen who are ready to vote in the open on the merits of this issue or any other, without weighing party considerations and the danger of political death, are fit to make our country’s laws.