THE INQUIRING CONGRESSMEN

The 82nd Congress, whatever else it achieves, has already set a record for investigations. In their first session last year, the inquiring Congressmen held 130 hearings, ranging in subject from MacArthur's dismissal to the use of chemicals in food products. In their second session, now under way, the legislators will probably handle an even larger number of inquiries. On the schedule:

The McCarran Committee (Senate) will carry on the hunt for Communists, fellow travelers and subversive influences on U.S. policy. Its chairman, Nevada's Pat McCarran, has twelve projects in hand. Only one -- the probe of the influential Institute of Pacific Relations (TIME, Sept. 3) -- has yet been unfolded for the public eye; the eleven others are still under wraps in executive session.

The Hoey Committee (Senate) has become the biggest watchdog on corruption in federal executive departments. Under North Carolina's frock-coated Clyde Hoey, helped especially by Wisconsin's Joe McCarthy and California's Dick Nixon, the committee last year exposed Bill Boyle and the American Lithofold Corp. This year, fortified with a $100,000 budget and eight investigators, it will tackle the sale of tankers by the Maritime Commission in 1947 to the American Overseas Tanker Corp., then headed by Joseph E. Casey, onetime Congressman from Clinton, Mass. It will also delve further into the activities of ex-War Assets Administrator Jess Larson.

The Johnson Committee (Senate) is spot checking the armed forces, whose gargantuan appropriations, as Illinois' Paul Douglas has said, defy comprehensive study and evaluation by any Congressman. Under Texas' Lyndon Johnson, the committee has already done a vigorous research job on the high cost of military housing, boot training in Hawaii, top-heavy brass in the Pentagon. Current objectives: favoritism in military procurement; racketeering in hiring workers for overseas bases.

The King Committee (House), under California's Cecil King, is the scourge of the Bureau of Internal Revenue. Next month it will lash away some more, at hearings in San Francisco, where some of the BIR's shadiest shenanigans have gone on.

The Hardy Committee (House), an important brother-in-arms of the Johnson Committee, has vowed to find out just how the armed services spend the $4.8 billion appropriated for military construction in the last session. Virginia's Porter Hardy Jr., the chairman, has led his committee on a 10,000-mile inspection of U.S. bases abroad, and the committee will soon make its first report.

Besides these five major committees, better known by the names of their chairmen, are scores of less publicized operations, any one of which may suddenly make the headlines. Among them:

P: The House Judiciary Committee may yield to a clamor from its Republican minority and begin a fulldress investigation of the Department of Justice.

P: A Senate Subcommittee on Rules & Administration is sifting a charge by Connecticut's Bill Benton that Wisconsin's Joe McCarthy is unfit to be a Senator.

P: A Senate Subcommittee on Agriculture & Forestry has nosed through the phenomenal outsidebusiness profits of some employees of the Farm Credit Administration, will soon report on strange goings-on in the St. Louis Land Bank.

P: The House Un-American Activities Committee, the granddaddy of the headlinemakers, is quietly measuring off the possibility of an investigation into Communist plans for sabotage of U.S. industry. P: The House Armed Services Committee is preparing a report on the death of OSS's Major William Holohan in Italy (TIME, Aug. 27). P: A special House committee will soon hold open hearings on the Katyn Forest massacre (TIME, Nov. 26). P: A Senate Subcommittee on the District of Columbia will look into crime in the nation's capital. P: A Senate Subcommittee on the Post Office & Civil Service will study the government's manpower situation, probing for wasteful use of personnel.

P: Then, there is a notable lone investigator, Delaware's Senator John Williams, who stirred up the case against the Bureau of Internal Revenue. Williams, who lends a hand to any committee, has been busy supplying leads involving the Farm Credit Administration and the Commodity Credit Corp.

In all this activity, the inquiring Congressmen are not necessarily after headlines exclusively, although in a hot political year headlines can mean a lot. They are also exercising a historical function: the legislative check & balance on the executive. Nowadays, when the executive arm has become outsize and uncheckable by other means, the congressional investigation can dig up the facts for corrective lawmaking, give the public its best chance to see how its bureaucrats conduct themselves and how its money is being spent.

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