University of South Carolina Libraries
JIM FARRELL EDITOR LUCRETIA JONES DAVE LUNDGREN MANAGING ED AD. MNGR. EDITORIALS Buy-focals for Nixon President Nixon has decided to sign a bill into law that appropriates $21.3 billion for weapons. Nixon also decided to ignore the amendment to the bill that calls for the end of the war at the most practical date in return for the release of American prisoners. Senate Democratic Leader Mike Mansfield stated that the Senate has passed an amendmenf of this nature four times in one form or another and shall be back again. Nixon seems to think that his plan for pulling out of the war is the right, just and only way. There are many who seem to disagree and the proof is the amendment. Our esteemed president does not see that pulling out with the immediate release of the prisoners is not wrong. Perhaps it would be a good idea for the President to note that two Indochinese countries have withdrawn their constitutions in favor of complete government control. We are also fighting a war to uphold an election with only one candidate which amounts to giving it the sanction of the U. S. government. We hope that men like Mansfield, on both sides of the political fence, continue to fight for a definite date for the end of the war and the release of prisoners. There is no excuse for this type of blind executive decision making. Perhaps a good pair of bi-focals, a rocking chair and a mint julip for Nixon in January '73 is the best answer. I. M6 7/EC TC--P NE Yt/E NRUG( Our Times 'Labrilib, By SMITH HEMPSTONE The left wing of the labor-civil rights-women's lib lobby opposes William H. Rehnquist for three I reasons: He is young (47), aggressive and conservative. The labrilibs' opposition might not have been so vehement had only one or even two of these factors obtained. Witness the fact that opposition to President Nixon's other nominee to the Supreme Court, Lewis F. Powell Jr., has been negligible. Powell in all probability will prove to be just as conservative as Rehnquist. But the Virginian is a shy man of 64. As such, he is likely neither to become a driving force within the court's conservative bloc nor to remain many years upon the bench which he ap proaches both reluctantly and late in life. The Arizonan, however, is quite another matter. At his age, Rehnquist can look forward to two, perhaps three, decades on the high court. Everything in his past in dicates that those will be vigorous years, with Rehnquist perhaps becoming the conservative bloc's intellectual playmaker, the court's real leader if not its titular one. So the labrilibs reason correctly that, while they can afford to let Powell join the court without a struggle, they must fight Harriet Van Hon Another' By HARRIET VAN HORNE Columnist And now a hopeful plume of smoke is rising from the bat tlefield. The Justice Department says Williams Rehnquist is not now, nor indeed has ever been, a member of the John Birch Society. The John Birch Society, which makes a tribal fetish of secrecy, isn't saying yes or no. The sporting thing would be to give Mr. Rehnquist the benefit of the doubt. But his public statements over the past 10 years, while considerably less vicious and paranoid than the fulminations of the Birchers, leave no doubt that Mr. Nixon's lawyer's lawyer would have been, if not at home, at least not uncomfortable In Robert Welch's own cell. Whatever the truth, it is still shocking that the President would seek to place on the highest court In the land a man one could even suspect of having been a Bircher. Despite the opposition of liberals and civil rights groups, there seems to be little doubt that both Mr. Rehnquist and Lewis F. Powell will be confirmed by the Senate. Thus, with four ap pointments in three years, President Nixon will have moved the Supreme Court firmly back toward the 19th century. At a time when all the problems rending our society may be fairly called anguished, problems requiring liberal, progressive, humane judgments, we shall have a court sitting smugly on the side of repression. The Nixon court will go down in history as having lent Its sanction to property rights over human rights, to big corporations over consumers, to the enemies of the poor, the young and the black. All that Nixon and Agnew preach, the Supreme Court will'now practice. If William Rehnquist never was a Bircher back In Phoenix, he'll doubtless be granted an honorarY opposei Rehnquist, if only in the hope of pressuring him into moderating his views once he dons his robe. Now it would hardly be tenable to attack a nominee on grounds that he is 47. Nor can one fault a candidate for being energetic, literate and articulate. So Rehnquist's foes, in the absence of any evidence of moral or ethical impropriety, have been reduced to attacking him on the basis of his conservative philosophy. Yet, since it is clear that any president has the right to name to the Supreme Court a candidate whose political philosophy is at tuned to his own, it is not expedient for Rehnquist's enemies to say they oppose him because he is a conservative. It must be shown, implied or insinuated that Rehnquist has sinned against the liberal holy trinity, that he is anti labor, anti-black and anti-civil liberties. And although Rehnquist's career, both as a member of the Goldwater wing of the Republican party and as assistant attorney general, is both extensively and publicly documented, the most damning evidence his opponents could produce, after weeks of intensive investigation, was that he opposed an open ac commodations ordinance in 1964, ze Supreme' membership in time. The prospect of living with Mr. Rehnquist's political theories is depressing enough. But I am also put off by a certain slyness in his responses to the Senate committee now questioning him. Asked for his views on civil rights, on the First Amendment, on the Justice Department's refusal to act in the Kent State killings, Mr. Rehnquist declines to answer because of his "privileged position." He had a lawyer-client relationship with the attorney general, he explains. Like a doctor, he cannot violate that sacred trust. Sen. Birch Bayh is not im pressed. Does Mr. Rehnquist not have another client? he asks. Namely, the public. Perhaps it would be helpful, the senator goes on, to write a letter to the President and.the attorney general asking for a waiver of his special lawyer-client relationship. A great deal of verbal fencing will go on in that Senate hearing room. But in terms of civil liber ties, these are the years the locust hath eaten. We shall not be saved and we may abandon all hope so long as the historic decisions of our time are made by hollow men. For an entirely innocent reason, I'm sorry Mr. Rehnquist is not and never has been a Bircher. I can imagine no spectacle more comic than this "fine legal scholar," as Gam< The GAMECOCK is published tri semesters with the exception of Uni .Changes of address forms, subscrip shou4d be sent to Drawer A, USC, Ci $3 per semester or $6 for both seines GAMECOCK this year received $50, entitling full-timne students to a subs GAMECOCK are in Rooms 316 an< University campus. Phones are 777 class postage paid at Columbia, 5. publication of the students of the Uni official publication of the Universit1 -notAecessariiy.-lepresent those of th4 staff members of ten GAECCK Lehnquist denounced civil rights marchers the same year and supported neighborhood schools in 1967. Rehnquist may or may not have been wrong in some or all of these instances. But he was hardly alone in any of them and they do not, by any stretch of the imagination, disqualify him for service on the Supreme Court. Indeed, it is interesting to read some of the quotationr from Rehnquist's record assembled by Americans for Democratic Action, which opposes his confirmation. Writing to the editor of the Arizona Republic in 1967, on the subject of de facto school segregation, the ADA charges that Rehnquist said: "We are no more dedicated to an 'integrated' society than we are to a 'segregated' society. We are instead dedicated to a free society, in which each man is equal before the law, but in which each man is accorded a maximum amount of freedom of choice in his individual activities." Is there something morally wrong or constitutionally unsound in that? It seems unlikely that men as disparate in their political philosophies as John Marshall or Thomas Jefferson would have found it so. Copyright 1971 Washington Star folly Mr. Nixon called him, being asked to explain Robert Welch's Blue Book with its windy nonsense about President Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles being Com munist agents. Last spring there appeared a hilarious book by a ormer John Birch organizer who rejoiced in the name of Gerald Schomp. At lun cheons with the Rotary and the Jaycees he was frequently in troduced as Gerald Chump, a name he finally decided he merited, whereupon he quit as organizer. In his book, "Birchism Was My Business," Schomp reports that many Birchers are so em barrassed by their membership that they insist the literature be sent to them in a plain wrapper. Like the extreme left, the far right is a frustrated group, seeking some sort of identity, some sense of superiority. A lot of bad eggs turn up at both ends of the liar nyard. But Schomp's work as an organizer introduced him to bona fide loonies who imagined they were being spied upon by passing airplanes and poisoned by canned food from Communist countries. On wonders, in retrospect, why we ever feared the influence of the Birch Society. Its membership, once 100,000, is probably less than 25,000 today. And most of them, we read, don't pay their dues. Copyright 1971 Los AniIes Tirnes scock~ -Weekiy during the fail and spring, versity holidays and exam periods. tion requests and other mail items humble, S.C. Subscription rates are ers. Bulk copies are $6 per 100. The 000 from the student activity fund, cription to the paper. Offices of the d 318 of the RUssell House on the -6176, 777-4249 and 777-355g. Second C. Although the GAMECOCK is a 'ersity of South Carolina, it is not an '. The opinions expressed herein do