The Birmingham age-herald., 1922-05-29
Daugherty As An Issue
rom the New York World.

From tne NSW 4oIh Woilu'
 The republican leaders of the House make no concealment of their intention to block the Woodruff-J Johnson resolution providing for an investigation of Attorney General Daugherty and the department of justice
 MT. Mondell, the republican floor leader, pleads that the proposed inquiry would be "a reflection on the President" Representative Campbell, chairman of the committee on rules, who is holding back the resolution, adopts Mr. Daugherty's disingenuous defense and pretends that an investigation would aid the war grafters that the Attorney General lis indicting and prosecuting"
 The Woodruff-Johnson resolution was intro duced by two republican members of the House, both of whom made public charges that MT. Daugherty had personally intervened to pre- vent the prosecution of men who had defrauded the government It had nothing to do with the subsequent revelations in regard to MT. Daugh- erty's part in the Morse pardon scandal. It is in no sense "a reflection the President ex- cept as the President chooses to intervene in behalf of his Attorney General. In that case he must share both the political and the moral responsibility for the partisan decision to smother these proceedings.
 MT. Daugherty himself could relieve the President of embarrassment either by resigning or by demanding searching investigation. That is what most of his predecessors in office would have done in similar circumstances. The more the issue is discussed in the House and the Senate the more inevitable it is that the Attor- ney General must soon come into the open and face his accusers. Senator Norris of Nebraska, who is a republican, summed up the situation concisely when he said that "there is no reascn or sense in trying to head off this investiga- ton. The men in the republican party who att tempt to do it will be repudated in the end"
 MT. Harding may not see this, but he cannot keep his eyes closed indefinitely. He must be aware of the fact that MT. Daugherty finds few apologists and no outright defenders among the leading republican newspapers, and those republicans who speak for him in Con- gress have never undertaken to meet any of the accusations against him. All they do is to set up the hollow and hypocritical claim that he is the victim of war fraud beneficiaries who are Seeking to prevent prosecution. Not one of them believes it, but they can think of nothing else to say, and MT. Daugherty himself is of no sistance to them.
 The most shocking part of this scandal is the moral obtuseness shown by the republican lead CTS from the President down. Their attitude is that of men who are determined that the Att torney General must be shielded from investi- gaton by a republican committee of repub- lican Congress, not because there is nothing to investigate, but because he is the Presidents friend and is the managing politician who brought about Mir. Harding's nomination at Chicago. Even in the worst days of corruption
 
 ing so flagrantly impudent and defiant as that.
 MT. Daugherty has become the moral test of the Harding administration. He is now of the issues on which the administration will have to go before the country in the fall, and while the President possibly keep his Att torney General out of the roms of inves- tigating committee he will not be able to keep him out of the ballot box in November.