The Charlotte News

Tuesday, January 11, 1938

FOUR EDITORIALS

As we discussed previously, there is the intriguing question pending at the time the next amendment is proposed and ratified, as to whether it will constitute the 27th or 28th amendment, the reason being that there is some contention that the 27th amendment, proposed at original ratification in 1789, was finally ratified in 1992 when the final state approval came to afford the necessary three-quarters majority. This particular amendment has never been formally presented in Congress and ratified thereby, however, it being largely moot as having long ago been incorporated into Federal law by statute, the requirement that when Congress votes itself a pay raise, at least one election must intervene before the pay raise goes into effect.

The implications, as we discussed previously, however, are so far reaching as to be nightmarish. Is, for instance, the 1861 amendment, prohibiting Congress from passing laws prohibiting slavery, still languishing, awaiting silently that day when there will be fascist take-over of the land, and the remaining states necessary to constitute the 38-state majority will prevail to ratify it? Under Coleman's rationale, it is, provided Congress were willing to accept the last approving states necessary to insure its passage, even though achieved over the nearly 150-year span at present. In a country gone sufficiently mad, who knows? We have seen things occur in the last decade which we would have never thought possible from the impeachment to the 2000 election to the post 9-11 near suspension for a time of civil liberties in the country. It has been a rather rugged decade past for the poor Constitution.

As we suggested before, perhaps the next amendment ought be procedural, to establish an absolute outside time limit, subject to being shortened by the language of each proposed amendment itself, thus to avoid such potentially ridiculous and confusing results.

In the case of the 1861 amendment, could it trump the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery? Well, we don't have to answer the question today, yet...

And, we urge again that it may be time again to reconsider, for non-emergent wars not involving direct attack on United States soil, whether the war-referendum amendment should be reinitiated under new language, to let the people decide whether they want to go to war in a Vietnam or an Iraq-type situation, and once done, whether to continue funding the effort, allowing adequate time for withdrawal from an ongoing commitment thusly approved.

Then for the global warming amendment, banning the use of any vehicle utilizing fossil fuels, if manufactured after January 1, 2015, on any road or highway constructed or maintained with Federal funds, authorizing strict Federal penalties to be legislated for its violation. In that event, the automakers, foreign and domestic, and the oil industry would quickly come up with the necessary solution to the present dilemma. And, we are quite serious about that. We sometimes forget as a people our inherent right to impact our government and to make it work for us. Write your Congressman. Call this one colloquially the "Frozen Pirate Amendment".

The rest of the page is (not yet) here.

The country is safely past that war-referendum resolution of Hon. Ludlow, for the time being, at any rate. The House turned it down yesterday, but by the slight margin of 21 votes. Despite the President's direct appeal that it be defeated, despite the alarm of Secretary Hull, despite the ganging-up on the bill of all the whips and the wheel horses of the lopsided Democratic majority in the House, 188 Representatives still voted to bring the bill on the floor for debate and disposition. The strength of the minority portends the resurrection of the war-referendum resolution. It will be with us again.

And the great flaw in the resolution as Hon. Ludlow drew it is that, should Congress adopt it, it will be with us in the form of a proposed amendment to the Constitution for years. It will be shuttled around from this state legislature to that, killed, revived, killed, revived. A few of the Western states will pass it, but for the most part, if we know our states, it will be turned down flat. And then anti-war societies will materialize to agitate for adoption of the thing, and the country will be divided into two camps over going into or staying out of a war that does not even threaten with an enemy that can't even be named.

For, like the child labor amendment which Congress submitted to the states in 1924, the war-referendum resolution contains no time limit. Its proposal, in all likelihood, will have no sequel in its disposal. No matter how many times this or that state vote it down, it will always be coming back for more. And ten or fifteen or twenty years after its submission, it will still be with us, a perennial issue that has a beginning but no end.

Senator Bailey did not attend the Jackson Day Dinner in Washington, at which the President spoke, even though it was held in the Senator's hotel. He was discovered entering the elevator to go up to his apartment a short time after the President and his party had arrived.

"Why aren't you with the others, Senator?" he was asked.

"I like Jackson," he replied, "but the Jackson I know isn't named Bob."

Well, it is too bad for as able and studious a Democrat as Bailey to have become so completely alienated from a Democratic administration that he scorns the simple amenities. We would not have him be false to his convictions or fawn upon those for whom he had contempt. At the same time, he owes an obligation to his constituency to take part in, not withdraw in a pet from, the party organization; and that he has found much in the New Deal with which to ally himself wholeheartedly is shown by a statement issued during his 1936 campaign for reelection. By his own claim he had supported sixteen recovery and reform acts, including the stock exchange reform act and the utilities control act.

And it is Bailey who, since 1932, has brought up the average on the North Carolina Senatorial delegation to a point where the state could reflect that it had some influence in the shaping of legislation. If now we are to have one Senator who, when squeezed around the middle, automatically emits the word "Yes," and another whose vocabulary is limited to "No," why, we might as well call it a stand-off and let both their seats stay vacant.

Dr. Raymond Moley, former Brain Truster, made a speech yesterday in which he outlined a method for breaking the back of this recession. He called for:

A couple of months ago, a group of the nation's leading economists made suggestions for breaking the back of this recession. They called for:

Yesterday Lamott Du Pont appeared before the Senate Unemployment Committee, and during the course of the inquisition it developed that the industrialist, while he was perversely unwilling to advance anything so tangible as the "program" for aggressive Senators to shoot at, favored:

Also before this Senate committee came Dr. Claudius T. Murchison, president of the Cotton-Textile Institute. Among his recommendations for nipping recession in the bud and accelerating business and employment were:

From these expressions it is evident that business men generally and economists have a definite program. Excepting certain proposals relating to particular industries, they believe that business would go forward again if only the undistributed-profits tax were repealed, the capital-gains tax modified, and a clear line of demarcation, a sort of international boundary, drawn between governmental and business provinces. The administration too has a program. The President has asked for a crop-control bill, minimum wages and maximum hours in industry, tax revision without lessening the government's revenue or restoring old abuses, and has served notice that he intends to ask for anti-monopoly and price-control legislation.

Meantime, neither side, the administration nor business, is getting anywhere. They are stalemated in the execution of plans which, while reflecting different points of view, have in outline no essential conflict. And caught in this deadlock is a whole country of 130,000,000 persons, most of whom have only the barest comprehension of what the argument is all about, the sum of whose desires is steady jobs and decent pay. Obviously, the thing for business and the administration to do in such circumstances, before they get out of the control of both, is to compromise, to trade one program for the other. But obviously again, it won't be done. It's too simple. It doesn't settle the question of which, business or government, is to have the whip hand. Somebody's got to cry "Uncle!"

Glad as North Carolina is to have paper-making plants built within its borders, the State is taking no chance on the depletion of its wood-pulp supply. The Board of Conservation and Development has a committee the duty of which is to make sure that timber is cut in such a way as to assure a continuous growth and not denude the land.

This is a lesson dearly learned, this about conserving forests and replenishing the supply. The years 1920-1930 cost the South as a whole about 60 per cent of its available saw timber, notwithstanding new growths, and even then the South did not realize that these natural resources, however abundant, were not inexhaustible. Everybody conceded that conservation was vital, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Department of Agriculture with its soil conservation subsidies to farmers, and other Federal agencies have set an example which the states have seen the wisdom of following. What a boon it will prove to the South, which had been blindly exploiting its rich timber lands, only succeeding generations will fully comprehend.