Show 0 va INTO ah national topics interpreted by william bruckart washington one of the outstanding signs to be noted in the washington political situa wakes wake up tion these days Is minority the renewed courage and strength being gathered Ea by the minority there Is no longer any doubt about it the minority in the government consisting first of dyed in the wool republicans and secondly of old line democrats democrate who cannot quite follow all items of the new deal have begun to pull back for the first time since president roosevelt came in there Is at least a real opposition party astute students of politics and government insist it Is a most healthy sign and that it will make for better government in the end there has been opposition to a great many 0 of f the roosevelt policies heretofore but a considerable portion of it has been just silent mumbling and grumbling most of them seemed to be afraid of the widely advertised roosevelt popularity throughout the country mr roosevelt Is popular more so BO perhaps than any president we have had in many years but the support so represented does not appear to run to all of his proposals it certainly does not apply in favor of nil all of his subordinates the opposition now appears to have found out these fats and they are concentrating their attack I 1 noticed the first signs of it in debate in the house of representatives and in the senate where a desire was and Is plainly evident to call a halt new deal plans are not being swallowed without mastication any more the most important phase of me trend however appears to be in the tendency of the opposition to question c continued enactment of every kind of legislation under the guise of emergency needs everything up to this time has been pushed through with a loud cry of emergency 1 some of it if not most of it was emergency legislation but now everybody with a pet scheme Is rushing in with it as emergency legislation and it Is an overworking of that word that has brought about concentration of the opposition forces according to the consensus that I 1 have been able to gather from what I 1 have been able to see it Is a reenactment enactment re of the old story of giving the calf too much rope it Is choking itself to death the importance of this trend perhaps Is best pointed out by the fact that there are dozens of units of the new deal setup that are predicated wholly cholly on the fact that they were proposed as a part of the general program for recovery I 1 think none done can doubt that the dep depression n has presented an emergency just as great as any arising under a war but when any war was concluded the emergency was over then and there and emergency legislation was neither passed by congress nor sustained in courts one might possibly conjecture a bit as to where the emergency ended in the light fight to get the economic structure back on a prosperous tooting footing but the new developments certainly show a considerable number of leaders in congress and outside who are unwilling to have the emergency continue forever it might be natural to assume that the movement to halt enactment of emergency legislation had bad developed naturally from the tact fact that this is an election year tor for the members of the house and some 35 members of the senate political analysts of long service and able judgment assure me however that this is not the whole case they say that existence of a campaign probably has strengthened the backbone of some of the opposition but that the trend more properly represents the divergence of thought in the two schools of students of government ern ment if that be true as it appears to be then we may expect to see more and more assaults on the roosevelt position every time he slips with an error of judgment or on bad advice and he is human and those slips lips have and will come the opposition can be counted on to make the most of it for example and as indicating how the lineup Is changing attention need only be called to the changing opposition that has linero been encountered in lineup p the house on new agricultural legislation most of these bills are designed to go further than the program laid down in the agricultural adjustment act and to use compulsion where the present new deal philosophy has been based on voluntary operation cooperation co from agriculture itself there are half a dozen or more pieces of legislation the nature of which need not be recounted here that would give the federal government added control of farmers affairs one of them toi for instance would give the secretary of agriculture authority to tell a farmer what to do with the land taken out of production by his agreement to limit acreage of cotton or wheat or corn cord or toba tobacco cco most observers here construe that le legislation isla as giving the government absolute domination over the farmer and I 1 suspect that most farmers are not going to stand for that at any rate this and other proposals are moved forward because there la Is an emergency but I 1 have seen signs of a reaction among the farmers they are signs that never fall representatives from agricultural areas have been getting mall mail from home and there are many ot of the house bouse members who now insist it Is time to call a halt frankly I 1 hear bear frequent sharp declarations that the professors in the administration have gone tar far enough that means votes against the bills yet the professors are hard workers they never cease to turn out new plans and the proposals continue to flow from the white house to the capitol among the newer projects la Is one that proposes to establish a set of government banks to aid what the promoters describe as the small business the plan contemplates creation of the regional banks much after the manner of the federal reserve b banks an k a with the treasury supplying the initiation capital to the extent of here again Is an emergency measure it Is pointed out however that the project Is do banking for signed for perma industry nency dency it K ls Is therefore a move by which the federal government through a stepchild step child would be put into the business of banking for industry and of course once that happens the system will hang on and on it will hold so much commercial paper representing loans that there really will be no time when it can quit arid and retire from business I 1 was talking with a rather well known senator about the plan the other day and he voiced his private objections most vigorously he suggested that there was grave danger of the industrial loan system being strongly influenced by politics and that this condition surely would lead to the making of loans improperly secured loans that no sound bank would dare make 1 I will tell you just how far that thing could go he added it could easily reach the point where it if a business man wanted to borrow money he would have to go into the bank on the arm of ao an office holder and this senator Is a democrat a member of the senate for years 1 the incident Is related here however because it shows the line of cleavage clea vaga that has developed it demonstrates indeed that no longer Is legislation being put through congress just because the administration wants it another piece of legislation that Is going to have rough sledding Is the roosevelt tariff adjustment proposal it says on the face of the biu bill that it Is emergency legislation down in the text however there Is a provision that any of the international tariff agreements reached under provisions of the bill may be renewed and that they will continue in force as long as one nation or the other parties to the accord do not give notice of cancellation the opposition holds this to be a proposal for permanent le legislation isla tion under the guise of emergency plans some of the few republicans left in the senate and house have been chiding the democratic leaders about the tariff proposals of the administration because they would delegate to the president and the tariff commission more authority to revise rates upward or downward than now exists the republicans are recalling to their democratic friends how the democrats fought against this idea when it was proposed by president coolidge Cool idse and by president hoover although neither of those presidents included international agreements with the rate revision idea quite a humorous situation has developed as a result 0 0 officials Is of the department of 0 agriculture admit little about reported criticism they re farmers farmer belve they con tend ten that object to be expected peeled ex and that under udder the AAA plans being molded by administrator davis the organization and rules are to be kept flexible I 1 understand however howe er that there Is quite a bit of object objection lont reaching the department about the necessity for farmers allowing government agents to examine their records the reports I 1 get are to the effect that since most of the facts have to be gathered by county representatives of the washington government many farmers do not like the idea of neighbors knowing all about their affa affairs rs I 1 have inquired around to find Q out whether there Is any way that such a condition can be corrected and have found no answer except the statements of the high officials who argue that there Is little examination necessary the condition seems to be one that must be expected if the concerted effort contemplated by the AAA principles of crop control are to be effective the situation Is one that obviously and naturally develops as the government wades further and further into private business most persons recall the circumstances that came with the inauguration of the income tax as a system of raising federal revenues business men objected vigorously to granting government agents the right to dig into their books and records but their fight was to no avail 0 by eastern newspaper ulloa |