Insurgents

Three questions arose in Congress between the regular Republicans and their insurgent fellows. One case was in the House and two were in the Senate.

No. 1) In the House in passing out committee places the regular Republicans ousted the insurgents from all strategic places. The test put to the insurgents was: a) Had they voted for Longworth for Speaker, and b) had they voted with the regular Republicans to change the rule on discharging committees? They had not. The sword severed them from most of their committee places. The group from Wisconsin suffered most heavily.

John M. Nelson. LaFollette's campaign manager 1924, was taken off the rules committee and removed from the chairmanship of a committee on elections.

Henry Allen Cooper, aged supporter of LaFollette, he who nominated LaFollette at the Republican Convention two Junes ago, venerable and respected, was allowed to remain on the Foreign Affairs Committee but deprived of all seniority rank, which would soon have made him its chairman.

None of the others were allowed to retain any chairmanship and they were ousted from such committees as rivers and harbors, agriculture, postoffices.

No. 2) In the Senate the Republican Committee on Committees signalized the admission of Senator Bob LaFollette Jr. into the Republican ranks by assigning him to two of the committees on which his father held a place: Manufactures and Indian Affairs. Earlier in the week the Committee on Committees was deadlocked by the grotesquely inadvertent presence of Senator Wadsworth, no longer a member of the Committee, who strolled in and voted, in the absence of his successor Senator Means. Everyone implicated had displayed Olympian absentmindedness and no stigma attached to anyone.

No. 3) In the case of Gerald P. Nye, appointed by the Governor of North Dakota, the overt phase of the case is legal, not political. It is before a committee on privileges and elections headed by Senator Goff of West Virginia. Mr. Nye was appointed to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Senator Ladd. The Governor has the power by state law to fill by appointment temporary vacancies in state offices. Is a U. S. Senator a state officer? Senator Goff thinks not. The matter will have to be thrashed out on the floor of the Senate. Mr. Nye is reckoned as a progressive if not an insurgent. The Republicans, aside from legal questions, would like to seat him, fearing that not to do so might antagonize the Northwest and lead to Republican defeats there next year. The Democrats would like to oust Mr. Nye, to make trouble for the Republicans, but the case is complicated by precedent. In 1914, in a similar case about an appointee from Alabama, the Republicans voted against seating him; the Democrats voted to seat him.