Oil & Water

From the beginning, the 23 states along the U.S. seaboard took it for granted that they owned the sea bottom that runs out from their shores to the three-mile limit of U.S. coastal waters. Nobody seriously challenged that view until California, Texas and Louisiana began to get fat incomes from lucrative offshore oil leases. Then, belatedly in 1937, the Federal Government staked out its claim to the marginal lands* around the U.S. on the grounds of national interest. When in 1946 Congress passed a bill giving clear title to the states, Harry Truman vetoed it: That is a job for the

Supreme Court, he said. The court soon handed down its decision: the Federal Government has "full dominion" over offshore oil lands.

The oil & water states kept up their fight, and understandably: Texas in one year got $14 million for school money from tideland royalties. Oil interests sided with the states: they liked the leases they already had, found state legislatures easier to deal with than the Federal Government, and had a well-grounded dislike of federal regulation. Last week, by a vote of 265 to 109, the House whooped through the Walters bill, so neatly contrived and so solidly directed against the tendency of the Federal Government to grab everything in sight that many a land-locked Congressman found it hard to resist. The man behind it was Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas, and he was openly defying his great and good friend in the White House.

The Walters bill not only hands back the marginal lands to the seaboard states; it guarantees that any state will have exclusive rights to anything that may be discovered under its navigable lakes and rivers. For Texas, there is a special bonus: Texas will get control of the sea for three leagues (10 1/2 miles) from shore (because the Texas frontier was thus defined when she joined the union in 1845). And another provision grants all seaboard states 37 1/2% of anything the Federal Government manages to dig up beyond the marginal seas--clear to the edge of the broad continental shelf (which stretches out about 100 miles along the Gulf of Mexico).

It was a long, long reach which--if it should get past the Senate--will probably run into a presidential veto.

Last week the House also:

P:Passed, by voice vote, the Battle bill empowering the President to halt military and economic aid to any nation selling "arms, ammunition, implements of war and atomic energy materials" to Communist countries (a more workable version of the Kem amendment, which the Administration has pigeonholed).

The Senate:

P:Heard a subcommittee on elections excoriate the "despicable 'back street' type of campaign" which helped elect Baltimore Republican John Marshall Butler, unhorsed Maryland's Democratic Senator Millard Tydings. There wasn't enough legal evidence to warrant kicking Butler out of the Senate, said the committee, but in the future such "defamation, slander and libel" by a candidate's agents should be made reason enough. Joe McCarthy had been "actively interested" in the Butler campaign and the subcommittee thought a "sitting Senator" involved in another's campaign shenanigans should be made just as liable. The subcommittee's report was unanimous, signed not only by three Democrats, but by two Republicans, Maine's doughty Margaret Chase Smith and New Jersey's Robert Hendrickson. This week, Connecticut Democrat Bill Benton, taking his cue from the report, formally demanded McCarthy's resignation or expulsion from the U.S. Senate.

* Measured seaward three miles from the low tide line, and commonly called tidelands, although tidelands technically lie between low and high tide marks.

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