To the Senate

One day last week the double doors of the Senate Chamber opposite the Vice President's dais swung open to admit Alney Earle Chaffee. Slender, thin-haired, smiling behind his pince-nez, Mr. Chaffee is a Reading Clerk of the House. Vice President Curtis banged his gavel at Clerk Chaffee's appearance. Silence fell over the Senate. A Senate attendant announced in a loud voice: "Mr. President, a message from the House of Representatives."

Clerk Chaffee took one step forward, bowed from the waist to Vice President Curtis, read from a document:

"Mr. President, the House of Representatives has passed House Bill 2667 ... in which the concurrence of the Senate is requested." Thereupon Clerk Chaffee passed his document over to the Senate attendant, bowed again from the waist, smiled, backed out of the door.

Thus did the Tariff Bill come last week to the Senate. The House had passed it the day before. Clerks stamped the precious copy, entered its presence and pedigree in great journals, shuttled it away to the Senate Finance Committee where Chairman Reed Smoot and other Republican members prepared to lay rough and critical hands upon it.

Like all other bills, H. R. 2667 begins: "Be it enacted by the Senate and the House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled. . . ." That is about all that the Senate was expected to leave unchanged of the House's tariff handiwork. Senator Smoot prepared to begin hearings on the Senate rewrite on about June 11 behind closed committee doors. A month or more will be spent in this preliminary revision. After that, when the Senate gets the bill, the House will have to swallow its pride of authorship and the real Tariff Fight will begin.

The passage of the bill in the House occurred precisely as the Republican leaders had planned. Their amendments, and only theirs, were adopted. Minority Leader John Nance Garner of Texas, under the rules, was permitted but a single motion. He moved to recommit the bill to the Ways & Means Committee with instructions to eliminate the flexible provision which gave new and enlarged powers to the President to alter duties. This issue was not Mr. Garner's own. It belonged primarily to Republican Congressman James Montgomery Beck of Pennsylvania who last fortnight had flayed the doubtful constitutionality of this provision (TIME, June 3). On the Garner motion the vote was 157 for recommittal. 254 against.

Then came the final vote, with 264 members approving the bill, 147 voting against it. Small but significant were the breaks in party lines. Twenty Democrats, mostly from Florida (which got higher duties on fresh vegetables and fruit) and Louisiana (which got a higher duty on sugar) sidled over to vote with the Republican majority. Twelve Republicans joined the Democratic opposition. Most of them were midWest insurgents. One of them was an eastern regular--Philadelphia's Beck.

Mr. Beck's vote took courage. The industrialists of Pennsylvania, led by Joseph R. Grundy. had demanded the high duties of this bill, and more. To defy them involved a man-sized political risk, even for a constitutionalist like Mr. Beck. The Philadelphia Congressman declared the whole policy of the extra session a "mistake," insisted that he had voted his "personal convictions," left his more orthodox Republican colleagues thoroughly startled by his independence, as he departed to Atlanta to tell the Georgia Bar Association that, like the Parthenon, the constitution was "still beautiful in its ruins."

After the House had passed the bill, Prof. Zechariah Chafee Jr. of the Harvard Law School discovered in it a little-noted provision designed to exclude from the U. S. all seditious literature. Prof. Chafee complained that this restriction would cut the U. S. off from a large sector of the political and economic thought of Europe, would transform the customs service into literary censors.