opinion
Battalion/Page 2
March 24,1982
Strange rituals rule
in Senate chambers
~F
by Steve Gerstel
United Press International
WASHINGTON — The strange,
archaic rituals of the U.S. Senate, emu
lated by no known tribe, came to full
flower in the ushered exit of the de
parted Sen. Harrison A. “Pete” Williams
J r -
No man has ever been executed while
bathed in so much friendship and
lavished with so many words of admira
tion.
A stranger walking into the Senate
could not have been faulted for believing
that Williams was being honored for
some noble deed, rather than drummed
out in disgrace.
Yet, such are the tribal ways of the
Senate, no other outcome was even faint
ly conceivable.
Even if Williams, through some short
circuit in his mental process, had chosen
expulsion to resignation, the Senate
would have booted him out with affec
tion.
Williams, no matter his admirable re
cord in the field of social legislation over
almost a quarter of a century, was a con
victed felon, albeit appealing, who faces
three years in the Big House.
The question of entrapment, which
the .Senate intends to ponder at a later
date, aside, Williams had been convicted
by a federal district court jury, a verdict
upheld on appeal by the presidingjudge.
Yet, the workings of the court seemed
barely to intrude on the Senate as it pon
derously moved about the odious task of
sitting in judgment on a fellow.
To be sure, Williams was hauled be
fore the Senate Ethics committee which,
after listening to testimony and watching
tapes, recommended unanimously that
the New Jersey Democrat take his place
in history as the first senator expelled
since the Civil War.
Still, as is the way in the Senate, Wil
liams was accorded all the honors and
perks of office, even though he spent
much of his time last year as a defendant
in federal court.
Three times Senate leaders bowed to
his wishes and postponed the Senate
trial. The third and last delay was
granted to let Williams’ recover from
surgery. No one questions that Williams
underwent an operation although it was
one that he had resisted for over a year.
Once the proceedings began, the Sen
ate extended every courtesy to Williams
— even to the extent of listening to the
case for six days.
On one of those days — as if all were
normal — Williams was allowed to offer a
resolution recessing the Senate in mem
ory of former Sen. Clifford Case, R-N.J.,
who had just died.
Just as promptly, he was named, along
with Sen. Bill Bradley, D-N. J., as a mem
ber of the official delegation to the Case
funeral, an assignment he carried out the
following day.
But it was on the final day, after Wil
liams finally resigned during a long and
rambling speech, that the Senate’s tribal
insticts were fully on display.
Senate leaders Howard Baker and
Robert Byrd, their voices somber, ex
pressed their grief at his downfall. Senate
after senator marched up to him, shook
his hand.
Vice President George Bush and Sen.
Daniel Inouye, DHawaii, rushed to the
family gallery to embrace Williams’ wife.
And not much later, a defrocked Wil-
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liams, was greeted by hundreds of his
admirers in the marbled, four-story
rotunda of a Senate office building.
Williams was driven out of the Senate
with cause but the visible evidence was
hard to find on that final day.
And should the final court appeal fail,
some fellow convicts might w’onder why
one of their own gets a pension in the
neighborhood of $45,000, has all the
Senate floor privileges and is welcome,
any time after he gets sprung, in the
Senate gym.
Slouch
By Jim Earle
“And rarest of all is my quart of original, unopened
gasoline, 29.9 cents per gallon vintage!”
By David S. Broder
WASHINGTON — If you ask most
people, they will tell you that the changes
of the past generation have erased many
of the regional differences in the United
States and have blunted the sharp moral
edges of controversy over public issues.
The conventional wisdom is that we are a
homogenized society, governed by men
and women of adaptable conscience.
Both those beliefs were sharply chal
lenged this month in the Senate debate
over legislation to restrict the federal
courts and the Justice Department from
using busing as a remedy for proven
cases of school segregation.
The final Senate vote on the bill con
taining the restrictive language was 57-
37. Among senators from outside the
Old Confederacy, the vote was 34-36
against the measure. Among the senators
from the Confederate states, the vote was
23-1 in favor.
The one southern senator who voted
against the bill was Dale Bumpers of
Arkansas. Outside his own state, not
much was made of the fact. But his action
is more than a rebuke to the majority in
the Senate, which pushed through this
radical and dangerous abridgement of
the independence of the judiciary and
the Justice Department. It was equally a
reprimand to those who tend to see poli
tics as a “go-along-get-along” scramble
for the safest perch from which to pre
pare for the next campaign.
The point of this piece is not to elevate
Bumpers to political sainthood. He is as
fallible in his judgment as anyone else.
But he comes from a state which in 1980
voted out of office two other Democrats,
President Jimmy Carter and Cov. Bill
Clinton, who were moderates on race
issues and opposed to the court-stripping
efforts. He knew what the risks were in
the stand he took in isolating himself
from every other southern senator of
both parties, including his own colleague,
David H. Pryor.
orders or the courts from issuingti
(beyond five miles or 15 minutes ii
time), no matter what the findingsal
the segregation in the school system,
Senate was short-circuiting the Cons Ij
tion and undercutting the independt
of collateral branches of governmeiq I I 1
by L
This is what he said in explaining his
stand: “My words here this morning will
not change a single vote. I rise to speak on
this issue because I do not want either my
children or my constituents to think I
acquiesced in or only mildly objected to
what we are about to do here. 1 want
them and any person within earshot or
whoever may read my words to know that
the beginning of the end of constitutional
guarantees in this nation occurred over
my strenuous and vehement protest.”
T he essence of his argument was the
same one made by the American Bar
Assn., the chief justices of the state sup
reme courts, Sen. Barry M. Coldwater
(R-Ariz.) and other conservative indi
viduals and institutions, who were pre
pared to risk offending popular pre
judices in order to protect the Constitu
tion.
The argument was that in barring the
Justice Department from seeking busing
The argument did not prevailirii
Senate and it may not prevail ioIp
House, where pressures are build:,[I
the Democratic leadership to pc t
vote on a similar measure. I ^ ( e() l
Even writing about Bumpers’siatu^i
two weeks after the fact, mightbeaBLj ^ nt j ir
dered irrelevant, were it not for it, lecture
other point the senator made. Hbrchaeoloi
, , • , Ary Field”
Completely aside from my owndBU..
rin, dismay and repugnance oven«||(; (jmni i ttel
tion today,” Bumpers said, “I amqMentarion i
appalled by the virtual silence (wlent Cent
press, which either does not underswonsors
the implications of this action ., ,ofps emest y r 1
has not been paying attention." |!' ie var ' ()u:
I Com mi
The precedent of this law, he poll senting e;
out, can easily be used to restrict thei speaker w
eral courts from reviewing libel dedi searcji or
against the standard of the First Aw univclMf y-
ment or examining police searclie l <)IS(,,l(
newspaper premises for possible ri j ,
tion of the Fourth Amendment. I ■po
In time, I think the South will bei - 1 - 1
that one of its senators said what ft ■ p
pers said about this assault on theCffl ‘ Q J "|^J
tution. And the press will be ashai 1
that more of us did not. . i
to b
Letters: Bikes belong on the street
Editor:
I would like to make a comment on
Roy Gunn’s letter and all those graced
with his opinion. I ride a bike on the
street, have never hit a pedestrian or
been hit by a car. The sidewalks are there
for the 30-odd-thousand students, facul
ty and staff to walk on, not for you to take
short-cuts on the way to class.
You may be one of those more intelli
gent bikers who pedals slowly, has both
hands on the handle bars and watches
out for that student who will pop out
from a doorway or abruptly change dire
ctions. But you must be an exception.
Most of the people riding on the side
walks have no common sense. Riding a
bike without using your hands is asinine,
not cool as you might think. For those of
you that do, may a stone deflect your
front tire while you are riding near a
lampost. You will learn. Others think rid
ing on a crowded sidewalk is a game
where a near-miss at high speed is extra
bonus points. If you were going to ride
* Memory t
■sixth sense
jinformatio
on the sidewalk, you should set'iff: sen ^ es a,K *
speed at a fast walk when it is cr<r“ 1 1 1/ '
Would you try to speed your
through rush-hour traffic?
sent a ser
MSC Grea
p.m. in Rui
discuss th
trained me
Remember, you will be the one ini
ing injury, not the pedestrian. U.!,,(• I Reporting
forbid, has the right idea — No Bikes® Training.”
Sidewalk!! Until we get a similar rule ,1 Loftusn
heaven help you if you run into me,I "I P s y c hol
Enough of your lazy crap! I
RickB CT l««#!ra: Sclw '
Stop the real world, I want to get on
by Dick West
WASHINGTON — I am indebted to the
National Geographic Society for sending
me maps showing the locations of South
American Indian tribes, the sites of Aztec
ruins in Mexico and other interesting
points.
meters and what lies on the other side.
For what Reagan has said, for inst
ance, it would appear that all of Califor
nia is in the “real world.” Yet I keep hear
ing reports of “other worldly” behavior
in certain segments of that state.
I was convinced that if I went out
seeking the “real world,” I would end up
at a jumping-off place near Culpepper,
Va., without a parachute.
What I would like to see next is a map
of the “real world” that President Reagan
claims to have discovered out there
beyond the blue horizon.
The capital of the “real world” appa
rently is a placed named South Succo
tash. But I can’t find it on any of the maps
in mv collection.
Reagan has been quoted as saying the
“real world” begins 50 miles in any direc
tion from Washington. By my calcula
tion, that means the nearest boundary
lines pass a few miles north of Baltimore,
east of the Chesapeake Bay, south of
Fredericksburg, Va., and west of the
Appalachian Trail.
What is not clear to me is how far the
“real world” stretches beyond those peri-
Could it be the “real world” is not
actually as homogeneous as some of us
who reside inside the 0-mile quarantine
zone might have imagined?
A good map would settle such questions
as surely as those of us on the Geog
raphic’s mailing list are now aware that
the Botocudo Indians occupied part of
the Amazon Basin.
For years, I heard rumors that a “real
world” awaited pilgrims who ventured
far enough across the wide Potomac. But,
frankly, I never put much credence in
such tales.
Then Reagan came along and made a
true believer of me. The versimilitude of
his accounts have stripped away all
doubts that the “real world” really does
exist.
Thus far, my attempts to make contact
with the “real world” have been pretty
much limited to perfunctory gestures
like releasing homing pigeons on the
chance they might bring back some sign
of it in their beaks or talons.
I am told that if I am serious about
getting in touch with reality I should send
up a balloon with my name attached.
They say someone in the “real world” will
find it and mail it back to me.
They seemed to me either to fall into
the category of folklore, or to smack of
over-the-rambow figmentary regions
like Oz and Shangri La.
I’m not sure I want to form any per
manent attachments, however. The “real
world” might be a nice place to visit, but I
wouldn’t want to live there.
-
The Battalion
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grants and
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editorial tx
Experi
Human L
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havior” ant
Learning.”
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