30 Fulton Lewis Commentary

This is Fulton Lewis Jr. speaking from the studios of WOL. Here's the night at the House Judiciary Committee.

They really started something yesterday when they tried to kill off the H. Dempsey Clean Politics bill. I reported to you last night that this is the Judiciary Committee. After considering the H. Dempsey bill for nearly a month, and after the assuring sponsor of it, Representative Dempsey, they had the day that they would approve it before long.

After all that, they suddenly took a close yesterday behind closed doors, and they voted 14 to 10 to table the bill. It was that it was designed for the remainder of this session, which would mean, of course, that the legislation would be dared unless the sponsors of it could get it to the floor

for action in some other extraordinary way. That meeting was supposed to have been strictly secret yet today, but it seemed that some members of the committee refused to be bound by the secrecy rule, and so, through them, the story got out this afternoon as to just what happened in the meeting yesterday. That story has produced

a regular hornet's nest of controversy in the House Club for all day long. It seems that the Committee, the Judiciary Committee, already had taken a record vote on whether or not to table the bill, and in that record vote each member of the Committee knew how the other members had voted, of course, there was a margin of seven votes against setting it aside.

One desperate for the close of the meeting yesterday, a secret ballot was taken, paper and slips of paper. One saying yes and one saying no were handed to each member of the committee. The box was passed around and the member dropped one, slipped by the other into the box.