Tax Man

Ever since the retirements of Chief Justice George Ewing Martin and Associate Justice Charles H. Robb opened two vacancies recently in the venerable U. S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, Washington correspondents have been energetically spreading the rumor that one of them was destined for angular, friendly Chairman Fred Moore Vinson of the House Ways & Means sub-Committee on Taxation. Last week Franklin Roosevelt obligingly confirmed the rumor by issuing a batch of appointments upping 64-year-old Justice D. Lawrence Groner to be chief justice, naming as associate justices Cornell Law Professor Henry W. Edgerton and Fred M. Vinson.

An Administration wheelhorse still quietly loyal to the New Deal, 47-year-old Kentuckian Vinson acquired an equally unflagging love for fiscal problems. He need renounce neither in his new job, since the District of Columbia court spends much of its time on Government tax litigation brought before it by the U. S. Board of Tax Appeals, and is a place where the New Deal can well use a sincere friend. For his part Fred Vinson, who remembers his defeat by the Hoover landslide in 1928 after three terms in the House, appreciated as fully as any seasoned campaigner the security of a $12,500 lifetime job.

While Washington observers saw in the Vinson appointment a Roosevelt gesture to the House less likely to backfire than the appointment of Senator Hugo Black to the Supreme Court, courtly Chairman Henry Fountain Ashurst of the Senate Judiciary Committee could not resist a sly dig as his committee received the appointments for confirmation. Indicating to newshawks that he might have to hold on them the extensive public hearings which Nominee Black did not get, Senator Ashurst put his old tongue in his cheek, observed: "You may say that the Judiciary Committee will proceed with exasperating slowness as has been its custom in the past."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.