War I which, up to that time, was the greatest war in the history of the World. Then, we fought World War II. Nothing in the history of the world has been comparable to our deeds and accomplishments in that war. We fought the war against the most terrible depression ever dreamed of back in the early thirties. We didn't have to invoke any cloture to win these great wars. We won these wars with a free and unlimited debate.

We know the conscientiousness, the sense of responsibility, the devotion to duty that always triumphs among the membership of the Senate of the United States. Our country is great not only because of a particular array of laws and prohibitions. Our country is great also because of the character of its people and the character of the men who represent those people in its Government.

If you put an end to this free and unlimited debate, you not only open wide the door but you extend the invitation for men to depart from that high sense of responsibility and that devotion which every Senator carries now in his heart. We will slip back into this very evil of the party spirit. How often in the House of Representatives have we heard the appeal, "We must go along with the party." This occurs because party government is the means and the way of the House of Representatives.

I am pleading today that we not retreat to this position of party government, that we let the Senate of the United States remain as the great forum of the American people and of the constitutional American Republic.

Has anyone in all these hearings been able to suggest a single important or beneficent measure that has been killed because we had free and unlimited debate in the Senate of the United States?

What reason have we today, what arguments have been presented to this committe, that would justify us in changing the character of the Senate, in changing this American constitutional republic as we have known it?

I have heard of no bill, no measure, that has gone down that should have been passed. To be sure, our rules have brought about some delays, and I would be the last to deny that there have been some abuses. But, as long as human nature is human nature and is not perfect, we shall have abuses. However, I wish to emphasize that the benefits from free and unlimited debate far outweigh the abuses that may have occurred under it.

The most famous measure to my section of the country that has ever been defeated by free and unlimited debate was the Force bill of 1890, a bill somewhat in the same category as the civil-rights bill that is now before the Senate.

While I advert to civil-rights bills, I do not care at this time to go into a discussion of them. But every Senator must surely know that there has never been a debate on civil-rights bills in which Senators who are far removed from any sectional thought in the matter-Senators who considered the bill only on the basis of its constitutionality and what it might mean for the welfare of the whole country-have not proclaimed with great emphasis the evils of the bill.

One of the greatest constitutional speeches ever made in the Senate of the United States was the speech made by the late Senator from Idaho, William E. Borah, on the unconstitutionality of the antilynching bill. No one could accuse the Senator from Idaho, Mr.

Borah, of having any prejudices or any preconceived notions in the matter. He simply weighed the bill on the scales of constitutionality, and he was so shocked by the unconstitutionality of the bill, its contravention of the spirit and the letter of the Constitution, that he was moved to make this great and powerful speech on the floor of the Senate showing the unconstitutionality of the bill.

Another of the great speeches made on the floor of the Senate was the speech of the senior Senator from Wyoming, Mr. O'Mahoney, on the unconstitutionality of the anti-poll-tax bill. When we reflect upon all the rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights we recall that other bills that have been blocked in recent years by the rule in favor of unlimited debate, such as the last FEPC bill, which the Senate debated, served to deny our people such basic rights as the right to trial by jury, the right to confront one's accusers, and the right to be indicted by a grand jury.

As I have said, the most famous bill ever defeated by the free and unlimited debate was the Force bill introduced in the House of Representatives and valiantly fought for by the late Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr., of Massachusetts. He fought for the bill in the House of Representatives. When he came over to the Senate, he was very much opposed to free and unlimited debate and favored cloture.

After he had served in the Senate a while, after he had had the experience of that service, after he had grown in wisdom and knowledge and experience-and as we know he was one of the most erudite men ever to sit in the Senate of the United States, a great student not only of our own Government but of all of the governments of the world-he gave to us and to our country the benefit of his ripened and seasoned and mature judgment.

Let us consider a few excerpts from what Senator Lodge said:

It is not necessary to trace the long struggle between these opposing forces which ended in the most famous compromise of the Constitution of which the Senate was the vital element and which finally enabled the Convention to bring its work to a successful conclusion. It is sufficient here to point out that, as the Constitution was necessarily made by the States alone, they yielded with the utmost reluctance to the grants of power to the people of the United States as a whole and sought in every way to protect the rights of the several States against invasion by the national authority. The States, it must be remembered, as they then stood, were all sovereign States. Each one possessed all the rights and attributes of sovereignty, and the Constitution could only be made by surrendering to the General Government a portion of these sovereign powers. In the Senate, accordingly, the States endeavored to secure every possible power which would protect them and their rights. They ordained that each State should have two Senators without reference to population, thus securing equality of representation among the States. They then provided in article V of the Constitution that "No State without its consent should be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate."

What I am pleading for today is that the State of New York or Georgia, or Arizona, or California or any other States shall not be denied its right to be heard in the United States Senate.

Then Senator Lodge went on:

Except on some rare occasions, the Senate has been the conservative part of the legislative branch of the Government. The cloture and other drastic rules for preventing delay and compelling action which it has been found necessary to adopt and apply in the House of Representatives have never, except in a most restricted form, been admitted in the Senate. Debate in the Senate has remained practically unlimited, and despite the impatience which unrestricted debate often creates, there can be no doubt that in the long run it has been

most important and indeed very essential to free and democratic government to have one body where every great question could be fully and deliberately discussed.

Senator Lodge continues:

The Senate, I believe has never failed to act in any case of importance where a majority of the body really and genuinely desired to have action and the full opportunity for deliberation and discussion characteristic of the Senate has prevented much rash legislation born of the passion of an election struggle and has perfected still more that which ultimately found its way to the statute books.

And then he closes with these words:

The Members of the United States Senate have always cherished the freedom of debate which has existed in this Chamber. Senators have been reluctant to adopt any rule of cloture, and, even after the present rule was adopted in 1917, they have been reluctant to invoke it. Cloture is a gag rule. It shuts off debate. It forces all free and open discussion to come to an end. Such a practice destroys the deliberative function which is the very foundation for the existence of the Senate. It was the intent of the framers of the Federal Constitution to obtain from the upper Chamber of the Congress a different point of view from that secured in the House of Representatives. Thus the longer time, the more advanced age, the smaller number, the equal representation of all States. Careful and thorough consideration of legislation is more often needed than the limitation of debate.

Gentlemen, Senator Lodge knew, even as we know, of the temptations and the pressures that present themselves. He knew that a party in control, perhaps at a given moment somewhat intoxicated with its new-found power or perhaps forgetful of the great responsibility of power, may be whipped on by pressure groups or spurred by political expediency to act without full and complete deliberation and mature consideration and do the very thing that George Washington warned us against.

I want to close with this quotation from the late Senator Charles McNary, who was not only a great Senator, much honored and beloved and esteemed by his colleagues as the leader of his party in the Senate, but who also was the vice-presidential nominee of his party in 1940. He said:

Every Republican except two were for the bill from sunrise to evening star and from evening star to sunrise in order to have the bill passed. But, Mr. President, I am not willing to give up the right of free speech and full and untrammeled opportunity for argument. That right is the last palladium. It is the last impregnable trench for those who may be oppressed or who are about to be oppressed. It may be the last barrier to tyranny.

Those who now press for this change, who would deny this free speech, may well be the first ones who will be in need of the protection of free speech.

We recall the words of Benjamin Franklin when he was asked what the Constitutional Convention had done. His answer was: "We have given you a republic, if you can keep it."

Gentlemen, for 168 years we have kept this Republic. I am today pleading with you: Let us continue to keep it as it has existed and as we know it today with all its benefits and blessings for our people. Senator TALMADGE. Thank you very much, Senator Hill, for your fine statement.

The next witness then is Mr. Bertrand L. Comparet, Citizens' Congressional Committee, San Diego, Calif.

Mr. Comparet, will you just have a seat there and proceed informally?

STATEMENT OF BERTRAND L. COMPARET, CITIZENS' CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE, SAN DIEGO, CALIF.

Mr. COMPARET. Mr. Chairman, might I inquire first as to the matter of time limits on it? And if I do not have time for everything

Senator TALMADGE. The time limit for each presentation has been set at 10 minutes for the remainder of the hearings. We want to be as courteous as we can to all witnesses. If some witnesses desire to go a few minutes over the time, I do not think either the Senator from New York or myself would object.

We would be happy to insert any pertinent material that you have, if you desire to do so, in the record, Mr. Comparet, in the event you do not have time to complete your testimony.

Mr. COMPARET. Yes, sir. I have turned over to Mr. West a copy of my complete statement. There will not be time to give all of it orally here.

Senator TALMADGE. If we do not get to all of it, it will be inserted in the record.

Mr. COMPARET. Thank you, sir.

I want to register our opposition to these proposed amendments to rule XXII, because I believe that they represent a real threat to American liberty.

Now, my opinion, of course, means nothing unless I back it up by the reasons for it.

The situation has reached the point where the Senate of the United States is the one remaining guardian of the liberties of the American people; and the Senate's job historically, from the beginning, has not been to hastily rubberstamp all the unwise and sometimes vicious legislation that organized pressure groups try to jam through. The Senate's job has been to stop all bad legislation.

George Washington himself likened it to the matter of pouring your too-hot tea out of the cup into the saucer and giving it a chance to cool off.

And these proposed amendments are all an attempt to take away that, and to enable organized pressure groups to jam through vicious measures without time to expose what is wrong with them.

The fact is that the United States right now is actually undergoing revolution. We have been taught to think revolution is always a violent overthrow of the Government. It is not. Revolution is the substitution of a new political or social order by means other than the lawful and honest amendment of the Constitution.

And the Socialists have discovered that, although they cannot hope to succeed by violent revolution, they can have a revolution by subversion and hypocrisy. Their first method is the historic one of infiltration of the major parties and by the use of minority group pressures to appeal to the party, "Now, get a few more votes added to you by selling out the majority to get the votes of this minority group." They infiltrate and take control of major parties-the historic method of the "tail wagging the dog."

They did it in England, and introduced some terribly vicious measures there. The English people woke up and turned the Labor Party out of office. The Socialists learned their lesson from that. They decided the thing to take over and infiltrate and corrupt or subvert was a group that cannot be turned out of office by the voters. In other

words, if you can just subvert the Supreme Court, the subversion of the rest of the Constitution follows automatically.

There is no longer any hope, as there was in the past, that when vicious and unconstitutional measures once get by a legislative body you have a backstop in a Supreme Court which will correct those things. We might just as well face the issue on it. We have got to eventually. We might just as well be honest about it now.

The mere fact that a group of nine men almost entirely without judicial experience the Supreme Court Chief Justice has never been so much as a country justice of the peace trying $30 lawsuits before he was elevated to that position. A group of men appointed because of their political activity and appointed to continue their political activity under the guise of judicial decision.

Those men are undertaking to give us a new Constitution, created in their own image, and they are doing it under the guise of so-called interpretation that interprets out and perverts the whole spirit of the Constitution.

Who are they kidding when they tell us that in more than a century and a half of our existence, during which the great giants of American legal history have sat on that bench, no one but the present little group of nine men ever understood what the Constitution was about? They know better than that.

When they can tell us, with no one legal authority cited-because every legal authority on the books is entirely against them-when they can throw all that out the window, when they can disturb the constitutional rights of the States that have been honored by their more honorable predecessors on the bench for two generations, when they can throw that out of the window with no authority save that of a more or less Communist alien, a man who may not have a technical membership in the party but who spouts its doctrines, a man who has said our American Constitution is, to use his own words, "a plot against the common people," when with that as their only authority they can throw this out on the specious ground that "we cannot turn the clock back to 1896" in order to continue in force the decisions of their own Court previously made, what are you going to say when they make their next decision that they cannot turn the clock back to 1791, when we adopted the Bill of Rights, in order to keep the American constitutional liberties of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and the right to jury trial, and the rest of your Bill of Rights? That is what you are going to get next. Now, I am a lawyer. I know that somebody has to lose every lawsuit. I know that there are times when you have a close decision, and somebody has to make a decision. I do not have the idea that every decision I do not agree with is wrong or corrupt. I have long since learned better than that.

But, likewise, nobody can kid me when they take a sanctimonious air and subvert the Constitution and say, "Oh, this is nothing but interpretation." You cannot interpret contrary to its language and fool anybody who knows the law. And that is what they have done. Now, the one guardian of the liberties of the American people remains the Senate. I do not have to tell Senators or Congressmen what pressures they are under constantly from these organized minority pressure groups. You all know just how many hours, probably, it has