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Friday, October 6, 1972
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN comment
Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
'Lords of Legislation'
Ralph Nader's report on Congress was released, in part, earlier this week. The report, titled "The Great American Default," concludes that the President and big business run Congress, but the little man could regain control if he would lobby his congressman vigorously, vote out the bad apples and hold the others accountable.
Nader said, "The White House and the President are emerging in the United States as a new kind of monarch." Until the little man takes an active part in government, "the proud lords of legislation can frolic in the pool, sleep quietly at their desk, vote themselves pork-barrel legislation, accept the money of special interests, capitulate to the press, and persuade by the knowledge that it is extremely unlikely that these pleasures will ever be taken away," the report said.
Not surprisingly, the report has met with little praise from those on Capitol Hill. It makes few bones
about what is wrong with Congress,
and what could be done to solve those lems. Generally, when an outsider like Nader criticizes a closed club—and especially when that criticism threatens the individuals on the inside—the critic is regarded something of a crackpot. Whether you think him a crackpot or not, his charges are not unfounded.
A student of Congress will tell you that in the last quarter-century, Congress has styled itself the protector of the status quo—an ex post facto nightmare. The seniority system and the committee system act in concert to bottleneck much needed and sometimes controversial legislation. A few key men have control of most of the important legislatures. The Republican progress. Unfortunately many of these men have been in Washington so long that they have lost contact with their constituentts.
Hopefully, Nader's report may change the present situation.
—Thomas E. Slaughter
Budget Responsibilities
The national budget has always been a problem for those elected to set it up. This Year Congress might decide to rid itself of the odd task of spending government money conservatively. To go along with the Nixon Administration's proposal for a $250 billion ceiling on the budget is an amendment that would give the president the power to cut foreign aid from the program that he chooses. Although congressmen might be cheerfully disengaging themselves from a tiresome responsibility they also would be voting themselves out of the power of the purse string.
Considering the power that the office of the presidency has accumulated over the years it is almost understandable that a president would consider asking for this additional power. What is incredible and probably unconstitutional is that Congress seems likely to give it to him. The Constitution states that "The Congress shall have Power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imports and Excises to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States."
I assume that the people who voted for the people now holding office in Congress expected them to be a majority of the Constitution. According to the
Constitution and to custom, Congress is responsible for allocating the money needed for the government and its programs. It is unfortunate that the people who now hold office in Congress have decided that they do not want to or perhaps are not able to be responsible for providing legal badger that should have come to either conclusion before they gave any serious thought to running for the offices they now hold.
If Congress does give the president the right to cut the funds for any program that he chooses, then one of the most important checks on the power of the president will be weakened. This power balance between the president and the public is crucial in balancing mechanisms that John Adams used to prove the worth of the Constitution when it was new. If the elected representatives of the people continue to gradually relinquish controls such as the management of money because they do not want to be bothered with the consequent responsibility, the executive must find that they are electing a new dictator every four years rather than a new president. If that ever happens let us hope that they take care to elect one who is willing to fulfill all of the duties of such an office.
—Mary Ward
*Guest Editorial
Political Loyalty Bonds
Ry CATHY SHERMAN
I was just seven years old when I first fell under the spell of political presence. It was a bleak, cold day in November 1959 and my mother and I were in the Wichita airport waiting for a flight north to the Black Hills. It was to be my first airplane trip and I felt a keen excitement.
In the long airport corridors there were posters with a face I had never seen before or perhaps had seen but was never aware of,
"Senator Kennedy is coming here to meet me," he said. "He's running for President."
It was a foggy concept in my life, and the new he must have great importance.
My mother pointed him out to me in the swelling crowd at the terminal, but I could not discern which one he was. Yet because our paths had crossed one chill morning, I became a devoted follower.
I was politically infatuated again at age 11 when Sen. Franklin came into my life as I was watching the Old Settler's Day parade in Mulvane. He was just a friendly old man asking me questions about the world around him, but he was simply dazzled. He had taken my hand, I had touched a senator. I didn't know if I should ever wash my hand.
The image, sight and touch of a political candidate and his family can be a potent weapon in gaining votes. Of course, candidates have long recognized it. It's not so when a candidate says but that he is associating with the masses, associating in person, however remotely, with the masses.
The complexity of political issues,
the charges on both sides, the
significance of foreign relations, the
economy—all these matters become
It may be too much to understand or to follow the Watergate Affair; was the Nixon Administration behind that? The wheat deal with Russia; did the Nixon Administration tip off traders? The phasing out of the draft; was this political engineering on Nixon's part? The raises in Social Security benefits; can Nixon take credit for them? Campaign funds; were all contributions on both sides reported faithfully and accurately? Will McGovern's military proposals leave the United States at Communist mercy? Does McGovern support liberalized abortions, support liberalized abortions, morriganu, or equal rights for women and homosexuals? The issues are batted back and forth. It sometimes becomes easier to just look at the image of the candidate, gleaned from a dozen sources, and stick with it or to look at the candidate as a personality instead of a candidate with a platform.
too entangled in uncertainty, in jargon, in elaboration. The average voter, before dashing to work, may see that the party is on the side or glance at the day's horoscope.
When Julie Nixon Eisenhower grabbed the gold spray-painted shovel and turned over two dainty scoops of dirt at the Kansas City, Kan., groundbreaking ceremony last week for a federally funded project for the aged, the elderly, the older children, the dozens of grade school children were scampering wildly around her, thronging for autographs.
It must have been a moving scene for those old women, their eyes misty with tears. The economy was a million miles away, the Vietnam war could have been raging on Pluto.
Jack Anderson
Burger Opposes Consumer Bill
WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court is supposed to rule on laws after they are passed, not nerdedie before the Supreme Court, Yet, Chief Justice Warren Burger sent an envoy a few weeks ago to urge House Speaker Carl Albert to reduce the products safety bill.
This would protect consumers from dangerous products. Burger fears it would also overload the federal courts with new issues.
The chief justice, there, dispatched Rowland Kirk's, the stuffy administrator of the federal courts, up to Capitol Hill to talk to Albert. Kirk's was accompanied, astonishingly, by one of Washington's most engaging lawyers, the Cork" Corcoran, who has clients opposed to the products safety bill.
"Not a week passes without speeches in Congress and elsewhere and editorials demanding new laws—to control pollution, for example, and new taxes. We want consumers to protect the public from greedy and unscrupulous producers and sellers."
For months, Burger has been grumbling about all the new laws that are being passed. He comments that the American Bar Association;
scrutinize all legislation that will create more cases."
He hammered on the same theme again a few weeks ago during a return engagement before the bar association. He expressed an urgent need "to have Congress carefully
This was clogging the courts, he grumped.
Putting his words into action, he sent Kirks four days later to lobby with Speaker Albert against the products safety bill. "Tommy the Cork," as charming an Irishman as ever practiced in the form of persuasion, volunteered to serve as Kirks guide.
When my associate Les Written called Kirkts to ask about his lobbying mission, Kirkts said nothing to say on this matter."
Corcoran had done most of the talking.
"I am not going to say anything about this," Kirks repeated.
"Does this mean you are denying it?" asked Whitten.
"But you are a public servant," pressed Whitten, "and the public has a right to know about this intervention."
"I don't want to be impolite,
Mr. Whitten," said Kirks firmly,
"but the conversation is at an end."
And he nung up the probe.
Corcoran was more candid. He acknowledged that he had taken kisers in to see Speaker Albert.
And he hung up the phone.
"Kirks, acting for the chief justice, asked me to take him to assistance. Although the drug interests have been leading the fight against the products safety bill and Corcoran has drug clients, he said he had not represented any client during the visit with his uncle, John Corcoran explained he had accompanied Kirks as a friend.
"I have known Kirks for years," he said.
"Corcornar argued that the products safety bill would clutter the courts, and Kirks would say 'yes,' the Speaker told us. He had he not intervened, as they had requested, to weaken he bill.
As Albert recalled the visit.
While the chief justice has been lobbying to keep public interest cases out of the federal courts, a confidential memo from Associate Justice Lewis Powell Commerce to hire a staff of lawyers to bring special interest cases before the courts.
"The judiciary," he wrote shortly before his appointment to the Supreme Court last year, criticized the judicial instrument for social, economic and political change. . . Labor unions, civil rights groups and so the public interest law firms are active in the judicial arena.
provide the funds."
"Their success, often at business' expense, has not been inconsequential. This is a vast area of opportunity for the Chamber, if it is willing to undertake the role of spokesman for American business and if, in turn, business is willing to
It looks as if the Warren Burger court may be more interested in encouraging special interest than public interest cases.
Footnote: The chief justice flew to San Francisco for the American Bar Association convention, incidentally, under his patronage. He is hagged by fears that radicals might try to harm him. Intimates say he greeted a caller at his door several months ago and then failed to respond to our number requests for comment.
Copyright, 1972.
by United Feature Syndicate, Inc.
James J. Kilpatrick
MR. CLIAN
3rd Party Platform 'A Knockout'
The preamble continues:
WASHINGTON - A vast deal has been written of the platforms of the Democratic and Republican parties, but little or no opposition from voters to the platform of the American Party. This is fair enough. Deprived of George C. Wallace, the American Party abruptly has run out of steam. It counts for little in this debate, but it is also its partisan platform as a knockout.
The Democratic platform evoked one image—the image of a woman in the Square, whooping up for share-the-wallet. The Republican platform evoked another image: addressing the Westchester women.
The American Party platform evokes other images altogether—bowling lanes and porch swings, lawn chairs and sawdust trails, Legacy courts and hot dog pits. Here nothing is ambiguous; nothing demands interpretation.
The major party platforms had their soft spots; they tended to be less flashy in their points.
The American Party platform hats like a pool cue.
It opens with a prayer. Can you imagine that? The idea never occurred to the major parties—but it occurred to the American Party, which "gratefully acknowledges the Lord God as our Lord and Savior." Ruler of the Universe and of the Nation, and appeals to Him for aid, comfort, and continuing guidance . . .
"The average man today does not think of himself in ideological terms, such as liberal and conservative. Rather, the average man thinks in terms of the basic problems which confuse him. He is also less likely to forge an opportunity for gainful employment, educational opportunity for his
children, the safety of his wife and child on the streets of his community, and equity in taxation which makes him neither the victim of those who by refusing to work have no income to tax, or the multimillionaires who use tax loopholes to avoid the payment of any taxes. He is also the ending use of his sons for gun-fodder in futile international involvement."
Now, that passage might offend the women's liberationists, and the crack at multimillionaires and aspects, but this is plain speech.
The plain speech goes on. The American Party platform expresses "total commitment" to
the Constitution; the major parties gave the Constitution, poor thing, no more than a lick and a promise. The American Party wants no truck with equal employment by law:
"We shall steadfastly oppose federal legislation permitting the federal bureaucracy to tell a man who he must hire or fire."
The party stands four-square for capital punishment, the justice medicine, prayer in school, and recognition of Rhodesia. It stands four-square against gun control, amnesty, and U.N. liberalized immigration, and the Equal Rights Amendment, and any sort of payment to able-
bodied persons who refuse to work.
The Republican platform pussy-footed around the question of gold: The GOP recommended that convertibility merely be "considered." There is no pussy-footing here. The American Party flat-out "advocates a return to the gold standard."
The party would abolish the Federal Reserve, put an end to price and wage controls, and reduce the unemployment in a period of three to five years.
Mind you, lest there be misunderstanding, this is not intended as an endorsement. Once it gets past the preamble, the American Party platform is mostly baloney—but it is honest
baloney. Many of its recommendations, such as the direct election of federal district judges, are fantasies—but these are pure fantasies. This is a platform to roll back the clock by 159 years, to the time of Madison, Monroe, and Andy Jackson, to the dreamy world of strong men, living women, and spacious skies. Ebel!
The whole world marches to different drummers now. But in our own time, a time of difference, with its joy and evasion, it is wonderfully refreshing to hit a document that doesn't 'dug', waffle or crumble at it. If the document, in many ways, is unequivocally wrong.
(C) The Washington Star Syndicate, Inc.
Readers Respond
Secret Plan, Letter to Salinger
To the Editor:
Plan Implied
In the Kansan on Oct. 2, Jonathan Jordan states, "President Nixon has never said that he had a plan to end the war in Vietnam, let alone keep it a secret."
Assuming Nixon does not practice black magic, he must have had a plan when he made
On March 5, 1986, in Hampton, N.H. Nixon promised, “If in November this war is not over, after all of his power has been at hand, I will ask the administration's disposal, then I would say that the American people will be justified to elect new leadership. And I pledge to you the new leadership will end and win the peace in the Pacific.
this pledge. Nixon has never made public a plan to end the war, therefore, there is either a secret plan, Nixon is a liar or both. You decide which, Mr. Jordan.
Dan Conyers
Dan Conyers Lawrence Graduate Student
Query Sent
To the Editor:
The following is a letter that I shared and discussed with Pierre Sailinger yesterday evening after his speaking engagement at K.U.
I reel that this letter raises several important issues and asks the Saliner to agree with the Saliner agree to its importance and take a copy that he intends to forward to Sen. George McGormen. Saliner also gave his
approval to making this letter public. It is with that intention that I submit it to the Daily Kansan.
"Pierre—if we do have a chance to talk tonight this letter will not be of any meaning, but if we don't talk read this. First of all give this other letter to me and I can tell you how I know certain specific about what George places to do if and when elected, otherwise I won't be able to decide whether to vote for him or not vote at all. I would like to ask him personally but I can't meet them directly. So give him this letter so he can at least hear my questions if not be able to answer me.
1. Elected—pull all out of Vietnam. Question: What does the U.S. military do for the rest of world history? Fighting involving the U.S. military is now over and we are attacked (when, by whom?)
getting the world together. Now, if either of you help get the world together all military will be obsolete. But as for George-if he becomes "inactive" what are the generals and businessmen going to do? That is question number 2. 2. What are the generals in the Pentagon going to do if business men want their wives? Or can Google avert that pressure by redirecting business into efforts at getting this country on a peace timeline willing to go to work or humanitarian projects, etc. I need to know.
"3. If the military or business does not appreciate the ideas that George or I might have as to what should be humanitarian—and growth—and peace—oriented endeavors in this country and the world, what chance is there for a military intervention? Probably none, but then what are George's intentions regarding the military and business? We haven't even discuss marijuana."
"So, what does the military do--protect our borders and allies and engage the opposition in a cold war—unless you conquer them," she said, getting in touch with Soviet and Chinese leaders for talks on
Bill Margulies
Bill Margules
K.U. Graduate, 197
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