Having a Wonderful Time

For twelve years, at the beginning of each new session of Congress, Pennsylvania's Republican Representative Carroll Kearns has methodically offered a resolution demanding that a congressional delegation be dispatched to recount the gold buried at Fort Knox. The resolution was what Congressmen call "constituent bait," designed solely to impress Daughters of the American Revolution, who are powerful in Kearns's home district. Year after year the Kearns resolution and dozens of similar motions have been ignored by the House Rules Committee and allowed to die decently—as the authors expected. But last week, to the surprise of Carroll Kearns, the committee called for hearings on the Fort Knox resolution, solemnly considered such problems as the advisability of sawing each bar of bullion in half, just to make sure there were no gold-plated bricks in the national hoard.

The Fort Knox resolution will not get a Rules Committee passport to the House floor; it is certain to be shelved by the votes of the new liberal majority, headed by Missouri Democrat Richard Boiling, which is anxious to get on with the business of approving President Kennedy's legislative program. But the Kearns proposal was followed quickly by Rules Committee consideration of a flood of other absurd resolutions, such as one that would have authorized a House investigation of "the social and economic problems engendered by parenthood outside of wedlock."

Why was the Rules Committee dithering over such matters? The answer: Chairman Howard W. Smith, 78, was still smarting from his January defeat on the House floor, when the Rules Committee was enlarged and packed with liberal Democrats, who would assure the free flow of liberal legislation through the committee and thereby end Virginia Conservative Smith's control over the House calendar (TIME, Feb. 10). Then, Smith and his conservative committee colleagues were accused of obstructionism. Last week, as he called up the constituent bait resolutions and forced the committee liberals to vote them down, Judge Smith was setting the stage for a future time when he can accuse the liberals themselves of being obstructionist.

It might not ever be very effective, but it was already very irritating to the liberals, and wily old Howard Smith was plainly having a wonderful time.