Cats, Cows, Pigeons, Fleas

Last week the U.S. Senate plunged into a debate on the Bricker amendment. Soon over their heads and caught in the crosscurrents of Supreme Court decisions such as Missouri v. Holland and U.S. v. Pink, the Senators tried to thrash their way to familiar ground. For many, this effort led toward the barnyard.

Georgia's Democratic Senator Walter George started it off. To illustrate his contention that executive agreements should become effective as internal law only when approved by act of Congress, George cried: "I do not want a President of the U.S. to conclude an executive agreement which will make it unlawful for me to kill a cat in the back alley of my lot at night, and I do not want the President of the U.S. to make a treaty with India which would preclude me from butchering a cow in my own pasture."

Later, Iowa's Democratic Senator Guy Gillette told of asking the State Department for help in distinguishing a treaty, which must be ratified by the Senate, from an executive agreement, which does not. The State Department unhelpfully defined a treaty as the kind of agreement which had to be submitted to the Senate for ratification. Said Gillette: "It's like when I was a boy on the farm and the hired man told me how to tell male pigeons from females. You put the corn in front of them. If he picks it up. he's a he, and if she picks it up, she's a she."

That moved West Virginia's Democratic Senator Matthew Neely to remark that Gillette "in effect, told us to go to the birds." The success of this retort inspired Neely to still further heights. He suggested that the Senate borrow from the late Humorist Stephen Leacock:

And here's the bounding little flea. You cannot tell the he from she; The sexes look alike, you see. But she can tell; and so can he.*

It was, it seemed, high time to buckle down to serious work, and a vote was taken on a minor amendment to the Bricker resolution. The result, 62 for and 20 against, was significant only in disclosing a hard core of at least 20 Senators who would stand firm against any change along lines proposed by Bricker & Co., regardless of any compromises or other kernels of corn which might be dropped in front of them. Many of the 62 who voted yes this week said that they would vote no if the original amendment or anything like it came before the Senate.

But Senator Neely can't tell Stephen Leacock from Roland Young, who wrote The Flea.

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