“Bill of Attainder” in the Seventy-Eighth Congress

Among the numerous recent clashes between the Chief Executive and Congress, only one poses fundamental constitutional issues. This conflict has arisen from the efforts of Congress to drive three well-known liberals out of the federal service. On September 14, President Roosevelt submitted a special message to Congress, as forecast in his press conference of July 13, recording his view that the action in question was “not only unwise and discriminatory, but unconstitutional” as an “unwarranted encroachment upon the authority of both the executive and the judicial branches,” and hence not binding upon them. The following commentary is offered by a participant observer in the hope that it may help to clarify the climate of Congressional opinion and explain in some degree why defense of the Constitution and subversion of the Constitution have become confused in the national legislature. Anti-Comintern on Capitol Hill. On February 1, 1943, Martin Dies of Texas arose on the floor of the House on a question of personal privilege to defend himself against allegations by the National Lawyers' Guild and The New Republic that he was giving aid and comfort to the Axis Powers. In the course of his two-hour address (Cong. Record, 78th Cong., 1st Sess., Vol. 89, pp. 504–516), he assailed 39 named officials in various executive agencies as “irresponsible, unrepresentative, radical, and crackpot.”