-editorial —
A birthday
surprise
The year 1976 may mark more than the
nation’s 200th birthday. It may be the year
that many of our personal and civil
liberties are violated and rendered useless
by Senate Bill One (SB-1). This bill could
be the most surprising and disastrous
birthday present in history. If projected
time schedules hold true, Americans may
wake up one day in the Spring of 1976 to
find many of the freedoms guaranteed to
us by the first ten amendments of the
Constitution either so completely
destroyed or so radically altered that they
would bear little resemblance to the Bill of
Rights envisioned by the citizens of 1789.
As frightening as this scenario is, even
more frightening is that people are just
now coming to realize that this bill even
exists. The bill is currently being con
sidered by the Senate Judiciary Sub
committee on Criminal Law. Chairer John
L. McClellan (D-Ark.) and Sen. Roman L.
Hruska (R-Neb.) plan to lead the fight for
full judiciary committee approval with the
bill expected to be reported out of the
judiciary committee in January. Hopefully
by then the national media will deem the
bill newsworthy enough to bring it to the
attention of the American people.
However, the time to take decisive action
is before the bill reaches the floor of the
Senate
The provisions of the bill read like a
grotesquely ridiculous version of some
“1984” political fantasy. Normally it would
be dismissed as the product of a twisted
sense of humor except that the proponents
of the bill are dead seroius in their drive to
push it through the Congress. The basis of
the bill is the majority report of the Brown
Commission. The commission, operating
during the Nixon era and the civil
disturbances of the 1960’s, came down
hard on political activists who opposed
governmental policy. In their zeal to
repress political dissidents, the
proponents of the bill want to give
Congress the power to authorize warrant
less wiretaps and place unconstitutional
limits on the dissemination of “classified”
information. Under SB-1 severe prison
terms of up to life imprisonment and fines
of up to $10,000 could be imposed on
persons receiving, passing on or
publishing restricted government in
formation to unauthorized sources. In this
case the unauthorized sources are the
American people. Under this prevision
anyone associated with the Pentagon
Papers case would have been subject to
prosecution. These provisions alone would
make a farce of the Bill of Rights’ freedoms
of speech and press.
Defenders of the bill claim some of the
provisions in the 753 page document are
worthwhile and should be retained and the
objectionable sections dropped. They cite
the amount of time and energy that has
gone into the drafting of the bill. Un
fortunately, the interlocking structure of
the bill’s sections makes it virtually
unamendable.
If the options of defeating the bill or
amending it are ruled out, the next option
is the Supreme Court. In theory this option
looks good; in practice it could take years
and numerous test cases before the ob
jectionable portions of the bill would, if
even then, be ruled unconstitutional.
It is the Supreme Court and its power to
interpret the Constitution and not the
Constitution that is the supreme law of the
land.
At this point what options are left?
Clearly we can’t afford to let this bill even
reach the floor of the Senate. The danger
here is that many Senators recognize the
need to overhaul our present federal
criminal code which suffers from a
hodgepodge of overlapping and conflicting
statutes. They might be tempted to vote
for SB-1 and ignore those provisions that
would invalidate the political freedoms
essential to the operation of a democracy.
Now is the time, while the bill is still in
committee, to let our elected represen
tatives know that we still value our
freedoms. The best birthday present we
could give to ourselves and our nation is to
make sure that SB-1 dies in committee.
Page 4 Section A
©1975
Duck Soup
-Oregon Daily Emerald
The Ducks' biggest obstacle
Letters
Bureau funds hidden'
The establishment of the ASUO news
bureau has a short but nonetheless in
teresting history. Seven days before its
opening day the first hint of the proposed
bureau surfaced in a vague memorandum
to the various ASUO programs prepared by
Don Chalmers. Several programs claimed
that they had never seen the
memo and a clear majority of the groups at
the subsequent program meeting felt that
the memo was announcing an established
fact.
One working day before its scheduled
opening Don Chalmers and Jim Davis
announced its inception at the general
program meeting. The reaction of the
programs to the proposal was over
whelmingly negative. It was generally felt
that the ASUO news bureau was an un
wanted and unnecessary extension of the
ASUO bureaucracy and that it was
designed more as a flak-catcher and
publicity unit for the IFC and the ASUO
executive branch than as a service to the
ASUO programs. Programs felt that they
were never consulted as to their needs or
as to the necessity of the creation of such
a bureau.
Of the seventy-five letters that Don
Chalmers claimed to have sent there were
two replies. Although Chalmers did not
volunteer what the content of those replies
were, an individual from one of the two
groups that did respond was present at the
general meeting and protested that their
reply was totally negative and that they
spoke to him about it in person. Don
dismissed her comments as being “only
over tea and cake” — in effect, denying the
validity of the responses he claimed to
solicit. Although there was a clearly ex
pressed need to discuss it further, Davis
and Chalmers waved away objections at
the general meeting on the grounds that
they were too busy to talk about the
subject now, that it was an established
fact, and “why not give it a year, and if it
doesn’t work, we’ll review it then." In a
year, Jim Davis and Don Chalmers and
several thousand dollars will be gone.
The fact that the proposed news bureau
is being funded out of “hidden” EMU funds
by the IFC in the same year that all the
programs it claims to serve were subject to
severe budget cuts is absurd. The student
programs need that money in a useful
function, not another ASUO vanity. More
than that, the programs need and want to
deal personally with the media. Dealing
through a press bureau prevents the
contact, experience and flexibility of the
programs in working with real people and
real problems.
Perhaps we need to spend more than a
single week in the creation of a news
bureau. Perhaps we might be able to
examine the real function and need of such
a bureau before we spend that money.
Mark Staley
Assistant Director SEARCH
Crooks write law
A word on Senate Bill One: It was
recently pointed out that the authors of
this legislation are the same crooks who
are now serving time or face charges for
Watergate and other related election of
fenses. The legislation is intended to
revise our criminal justice system. This is
injustice. A national news commentator
even pointed out that this means the
crooks are writing the laws. Big deal. So,
what else is new?
Barry Hood
Sr. Journalism
Prepare for shock
Remember the good old days when you
just had to go to the administration
building to get your free copy of the
University catalog? Well, prepare for a
shock. One can only guess that University
President William Boyd is planning to
install nickel-a-sheet toilet paper
dispensers in the johns.
With this in mind, let us review some of
Boyd’s recent ideas on spending money.
There it is, all laid out for you on the front
page of the sports section of the Register
Guard, Nov. 18. Boyd says we’ll spend
money we don’t have to increase the
football recruiting budget by up to
$35,000. Rest assured, the recruiting
program will be “impeccable in terms of
procedure,” a “model of ethic behavior."
But what are we buying with this money?
Read the next article, “Mean and messy.”
We are buying football players who play
because “It’s a situation where you can
make people hurt, and not get in any
trouble for it.”
Thank you, William.
Stephen James Remington
„ Physics
Enough for Tumbleweed
Tis the season to be trusting, blah blah
blah blah blah. Friday I moseyed over to
the EMU (Student Union , as it is
sometimes called) for lunch. This proved
to be a complicated and altogether very
unpleasant endeavor, because I was armed
only with checks, no white man's green
cash. I had a whole book of new First
National Bank of Oregon checks These
were not acceptable to the Main Desk
because I did not have a Polaroid snapship
of my pretty puss on the back of my plastic
ID card I had the following pieces of
identification; Faculty-staff plastic ID card
(without photo), Oregon Liquor Control
Commission identification card (with
photo), Oregon Driver's license, and First
National Bank of Oregon Courtesy card
(with which I can cash a check even at
Safeways without other identification).
Even without the photo on my OLCC
card one could hardly go wrong with the
description given on it, and on my driver's
license, of me; I'm a blond, six-foot tall
Neanderthal, with one eye in the middle of
my forehead. But the bureaucrats at the
main desk would not budge. Complaints
by me brought out the boss, who would
not talk to me, but simply shoved a
statement of their policy under my nose.
Sure enough, underlined in red, there it
was. I was angry, I was frustrated, l was
hungry and I was clearly in violation of the
rules and regulations. Caught red-handed,
what could I do but mutter “Drat! Foiled
again!" and slink off to attempt other
heinous crimes, like trying to sneak out of
the cafeteria with a paper cup full of ice
cubes or with extra pickles on my ham
burger? I do not wish to get into an
argument over whether or not people
should be required to have a photo on the
backs of their ID cards. I just think that,
with abundant identification I
presented (more than enough to cash a
check in Tumbleweed, Arizona), I should
certainly be able to cash a five dollar check
at the EMU across the street.
Stan Sessions
Biology
Compliments offered
My compliments to Brad Lemley on
see, "Thursday flatfoots homicide from
to Z" appearing in the 11- 7- 75 ODE.
From this vantage point that articl® ^
one of the finer bits of journalism intro
Emerald so far this year. I hope ther
more to come!
Kirby Garrett
ASUO Vice-President
... 21. 1975