VENI, VIDI, VETO

Pious, kindly, baggy Marvel Mills Logan, late Senator from Kentucky, was a man who wouldn't harm a flea. A peace-loving, Sunday-school-going ex-judge, he had shaggy grey locks and a nose of such W. C. Fieldsian proportions that he was once described as "looking like a rhinoceros crashing through a grass hut."*

In January 1939, with no apparent hell-raising intent, good Mr. Logan introduced an eighth version of his old bill to set up uniform standards of procedure for quasi-judicial Federal agencies. He had long felt that bureaucracy's big ears needed pinning back. Franklin Roosevelt, acting on similar motives, set up a committee in February 1939. under Law Expert Dean Acheson, to study the same problem. The Brookings Institution pondered; bar associations brooded.

Guileless Senator Logan died, but his fleabite, the Logan-Walter bill, remained to threaten the New Deal with gangrene. Anti-New Dealers saw in the bill a weapon with which to assassinate such agencies as the Securities Exchange Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Wage-&-Hour Division. With them were plenty of other men who were honestly outraged by the New Deal's bureaucratic stupidities and abuses.

The Bar Association of New York City upheld the principle of the bill but condemned its wording as "so rigid, so needlessly interfering, as to bring about a widespread crippling of the administrative process." Brookings dittoed the opinion. Everyone agreed that the measure opened up visions of an endless field day for lawyers. It passed the House twice: 1) 282-to-97, 2) 176-to-51; the Senate once: 27-to-25.

Last week Franklin Roosevelt vetoed the Logan-Walter bill in scorching words. Reasons: it would hamper national defense, flood the courts with unnecessary litigation, subject all administrative action to control of the judiciary, produce only delay, chaos, paralysis. He concluded: "Today, in sustaining American ideals of justice, an ounce of action is worth more than a pound of argument."

Mr. Roosevelt's ounce was followed by a pound from Attorney General Robert Houghwout Jackson, in prose almost illegally lucid. Mr. Jackson argued that the imposing of uniform procedure on all agencies would act "as if we should average the sizes of all men's feet and then buy shoes of only that one size for the Army." Under the bill, any citizen substantially affected and displeased by a ruling "has everything to gain and nothing to lose" by suing in the D. C. Court of Appeals. If he loses, he may wait until the rule is again involved and sue in some other court. A series of individuals might sue again & again over the same rule. An epidemic in Federal territory could not be quarantined, forest fires on the public domain might not be fought, without public hearings and advance notice; and endless quagmires of litigation could follow.

So held Mr. Jackson. Only 280 members of the House cared enough about the bill to show up last week for a vote to override the President's veto. Of the 280, 153 wanted to override, 127 said nay. The motion failed for lack of the required two-thirds. Representative Francis Walter, Democrat, of Easton, Pa. (ex-New Dealer who took up the bill when Goodman Logan died), promised to carry on next session. Prospects were that some compromise measure would be cobbled together.

* By the late Paul Y. Anderson, correspondent of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

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