Background of news –
Roosevelt-Congress test due
By Jay G. Hayden, North American Newspaper Alliance
Washington –
President Roosevelt confronts at least two issues calculated to disclose whether he is chastened by the Congressional uprising against his tax veto or infuriated by it to the point of precipitating an all-out conflict with the legislative branch.
These issues are (1) the compromise soldier-vote bill, which likely will be sent to the White House next week, and (2) the Slattery-Daniels affairs, which involves both the President’s right to discharge administrative officials and the validity of a Senate subpoena, directed to one of his close personal assistants.
The soldier-voting bill, accepted by all but one of the Senate and House conferees, varies little in its practical effects from the measure which Mr. Roosevelt branded, in a special message to Congress, “a fraud on the soldiers, sailors and Marines.”
The substance of the President’s contention was that reliance on state ballots would disfranchise “the vast majority of the 11 million members of the Armed Forces.” This condition, he said, could be corrected with nothing short of the Green-Lucas-Worley nameless federal ballot bill, which would permit soldiers:
…to cast their ballots without time-consuming correspondence and without waiting for each separate state to hold its primary, print its ballots, and send them out for voting.
Veto threatened repeatedly
All of the latter principles, which the present compromise bill retains, plus the provision for a federal ballot, is applicable to states which have no absentee voting law and to individual soldiers who swear that they applied for state ballots and failed to receive them before Oct. 1. Even in these contingencies, federal ballots would be good only if state governors certify in advance that they will be counted.
In the course of the Senate and House debates, the President’s spokesmen threatened repeatedly that Mr. Roosevelt would veto any bill that did not provide an effective federal ballot, and there is little doubt that this was his settled intention.
The happening since, which may have changed Mr. Roosevelt’s mind, is the tax bill revolt, led by Senator Alben W. Barkley. This development undoubtedly hastened agreement on the state ballot bill. Convinced that if the President vetoes this bill he will be overridden, Republicans were anxious to out it up to him. and it is a foregone conclusion that such a veto would find Senator Barkley again leading the van of opposition.
Coincidentally, it is certain that unless Jonathan Daniels, one of the President’s secretarial “selfless six,” recants his refusal to testify before a Senate agricultural subcommittee, he will be cited for contempt by overwhelming vote of the whole Senate next week.
Further, the Senate may try Mr. Daniels and sentence him, if convicted, to its own basement lockup – a course which Congressional lawyers say would put him beyond reach of a presidential pardon.
Precedent recalled
A precedent for this course was provided in the case of William McCracken, whose trial and conviction by the Senate itself on a charge of contempt of one of its committees in 1934 was sustained by the Supreme Court.
More often the Senate has preferred to turn its contumacious witnesses over for prosecution by the Attorney General in the regular courts. That procedure was rendered ridiculous in this instance when Ugo Carusi, executive assistant to Attorney General Francis Biddle, appeared as legal counsel for Mr. Daniels, while he defied the senatorial questions.
An even more interesting court clash will eventuate if the President follows through with an attempt to remove Harry Slattery, the rural electrification administrator whose testimony got Mr. Daniels into hot water. Mr. Slattery declared that Mr. Daniels three times tried to persuade him to quit, once offering him a lucrative State Department job abroad as an inducement.