Browning Chief

Two Wyoming Senators

There's an interesting contrast between the two senators from Wyoming, both able, conscientious men.

Sen. Lester Hunt, former governor of the state and recently elected to the senate, has just introduced a resolution to abolish congressional immunity from libel suits when a member of congress makes defamatory and untrue statements.

The founding fathers, Senator Hunt indicates, never meant congress to be a sounding board for such smears as McCarthy of Wisconsin and Schoeppel of Kansas have put across. Both senators have been challenged to repeat their libels off the floor of congress and this columnist offered to pay McCarthy's legal expenses in case he was sued. Neither accepted the challenge.

So newly elected Senator Hunt proposes to rectify this.

On the other hand, Senator O'Mahoney, also of Wyoming and in the senate for 17 years, has been presiding over a committee examining Senator Schoeppel's attempted Red smear of Secretary of the Interior Chapman. And O'Mahoney has become so steeped in the senatorial idea that a fellow senator should be permitted to talk indefinitely that he has let the Schoeppel hearings become a filibuster in which Schoeppel, with no facts and no proof, continues to talk for the purpose of saving face.

Under the American system a man is innocent until proven guilty, yet Senator O'Mahoney is so anxious to be fair to his colleague from Kansas that he seems to think a cabinet officer is guilty until proven innocent.