Communist Party Outlawed
The red-hot atmosphere of Washington has cooled some- what, and the Administration, by determined action, has avoided being landed with a kind of anti-Communist Bill which would make nonsense of its own anti-Communist course of action. What it has been landed with is sufficiently embar- rassing—an Act depriving the Communist Party of " any of the rights, privileges and immunities attendant upon legal bodies," and its members of citizenship rights, including the holding of Federal posts, making legal contacts, having banking accounts and standing in elections. Individual Communists would have to register as such with the Department of Justice. The Administration has now the air of a man who, in the midst of firing a series of bursts from an automatic pistol, has a nine-foot pike thrust upon him by friends anxious for his safety. The Communist Party will be able to challenge a law which seeks to strip it of its rights and thus perhaps reopen or confuse the long legal battle (contesting the registration provision of the Internal Security Act) which might otherwise come to an end next year in the Supreme Court. Eminent constitutional lawyers have expressed grave doubts about the wisdom, and even about the Constitutional validity, of the new Act. The FBI has received it with glacial reserve. But it looks as though the President will have to hold, and perhaps go through the motions of using, the unwieldy pike, while continuing to fire with his more effective armament.
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