Default

The Senate’s most prized prerogative is going by default.

The Constitution gives to the President and the Senate sole treaty-making powers for the nation. For 154 years the Senate has guarded this prerogative with fierce jealousy. But during World War II the Senate has been the scene of no really great debate over foreign policy. Even as Smolensk fell, and as U.S. citizens debated the postwar world with ever-increasing intensity, the Senate wriggled and stalled.

Last week that fact was dramatically plain. By a thumping nonpartisan majority, (360-to-29) the House had passed the Fulbright Resolution, pledging the U.S. to carry its full load in postwar international relations (TIME, June 28).

Then the resolution went over to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, whose chairman is an old political gas burner, Texas’ Tom Connally. For 28 weeks this Committee had drowsed over a batch of postwar resolutions, including the highly publicized B²H². Connally now called his Committee together, emerged with a statement that it would not report out the Fulbright Resolution either.

Argued Tom Connally: bringing the resolution to the floor of the Senate would only provoke a bitter debate, in which some Senators would have an anti-British, anti-Russian field day (ten out of 23 of his own Committeemen are pre-Pearl Harbor isolationists). In short, Tom Connally does not want to start the Great Debate. But Connally takes his lead in foreign affairs from the White House, and plain indications are that Franklin Roosevelt wants to write the peace with as little Congressional interference as possible. The result, suggested by levelheaded Columnist

Raymond Clapper: “Isolation has won the opening battle in the United States Senate. . . . Yet there must come a time when the debate must be held and when it will be necessary to have the worst said that can be said—because any course that America and other nations adopt must be strong enough to withstand the speeches of isolationist Senators.”