THE SUPREME COURT: All in a Day's Work

(2 of 2)

Lying in Company. The court's most astonishing decision of the day was the setting aside of the perjury conviction of deposed Labor Leader Harold R. Christoffel, who ran the costly Allis Chalmers strike in 1941. Christoffel had been given a two-to six-year prison sentence for falsely telling the House Education and Labor Committee that he was not a Communist. The Supreme Court, split 5 to 4, rescued Christoffel with a startling technicality: a quorum of the committee was not on hand when he told his lies; therefore, though he lied under oath, he had not lied before a competent tribunal.

Justice Robert H. Jackson could hardly contain himself in his dissent from Justice Frank Murphy's majority opinion. The court was trying to change Congress' own rules, he said. For more than 150 years it has been standard congressional practice to presume a quorum until someone specifically raised the question and proved otherwise (as no one did in the Christoffel case). Murphy's decision, said Jackson, challenged the validity of thousands of congressional bills which have been passed without a record vote—hence without actual proof that a quorum was on hand.

Pennsylvania's Congressman Francis Walter promptly began drafting a bill to provide what had always been assumed before: that Congress can run its business the way it pleases. Supreme Court decisions, groused Walter, echoing a former justice, are getting to be "like excursion tickets—good for one day only."