The Nome daily nugget., 1935-12-07

from congress to the President and others who had no constitutional right to them. About the codes, Chief Jus tice Hughes said:
 ". Section 3 (NRA) of the Re- covery act Is without precedent. It supplies no standards for any trade, industry or activity. It does not un- dertake to prescribe rules of conduct to be applied to particular states of fact to be determined by appropriate ad- minstratiye procedure. Instead of prescribing rules of conduct, it author izes the making of codes to prescribe them.
 We think that the code-mak- ing authority thus prescribed Is an unconstitutional delegation of legisla- tive power.'
 About the power of the federal gov ernment to regulate local wages and working hours the chief justice said:
 "Without in any way dsparaging (the administration's) motive, 1t Is enough to say that the recuperative efforts of the federal government must be made In a manner consistent with the authority granted by the Constitu- tion.
 "We are of the opinion that the at tempt through provisions of the code to fix the hours and wages of em- ployees of defendants in their intra- state business was not a valid exercise of federal power"
 Hits Processing Tax.
 On July 1G the Circuit Court of Appeals at Boston declared that the processing tax of AAA was an unwar- ranted use of the taxing power to reg ulate and restrict cotton production; that it was an unwarranted exercise of federal power to delegate unlimited power to the secretary of agriculture to administer the tax, and that the tax violates the requirement. that taxes should be uniform throughout the United States. In Philadelphia lower court ruled much the same on the hog processing tax from packers. The whole agricultural program was thrown up for grabs"
 It Is now believed that the admins trati0n will seek to push as many of these test cases through the Supreme court as possible, with the view that if they are there held to be uncOnsti. tutional, constitutional amendment to centralize the legislative power of the nation much more than it is now will form the important part of the Demo. cratic platform for 1886. That this is possible might be indicated by the fact that 3,500,000 farmers who have so far received S9OO000000, are directly af- fected by the AAA ruling. With their families, they might form a very sub stantial block of votes to change the basic law of the land.
 One historian Charles A. Beard, points out that three times before has the Supreme court "thrOwn itself resolutely across currents of powerful interests and ideas" Once was in the Dred Scott case, with it's aftermath oI tnC SiNIl "dib anu iotci thC teenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments, effecting important changes in the federal system. An. other was the courts attempt during and after the Civil war to restrain the President and congress in several de- cisions; its result was curtailment of the appellate jurisdiction of the court and an increase in the number of justices from seven to nine (the two new ones to be favorable to the re- versal of a decision which the admin. istration wanted reversed, and the court reversed iD. On the third time the court in 1895 declared invalid the income tax law of 1894. The decision was reversed by amendment.
 Of course there Is some question as to whether parallel can be drawn between these decisions and the recent ones against the New Deal. If such a parallel can be drawn:
 Will history repeat itself?
 Western Newspaper Union.