THE PADDED CELL

On the eve of a Presidential election the Supreme Court has thrown a bomb into the lap of the American people which should do much to crack the wall of adoration surrounding the Constitution. The five-to-four decision invalidating the New York minimum wage law for adult women shows that from now on "due process of law" will be as effective in preventing the individual states from enlisting social legislation as it was when Congress tried to do the same for the District of Columbia in the twenties.

The chief talking point of conservatives in their attacks on the extreme measures of the New Deal has always been that the Washington government was trying to perform duties that really belonged to the states. Even Mr. Hoover did not dare come out against minimum-wage and maximum hour laws, but merely said that the Constitution reserved such powers to the states. Mr. Hoover may have been narrow-minded and behind the times, but he was not inhuman, and to many people his argument had a great deal of logic. In the face of this decision such a clear-cut alternative is definitely out of the question. What was forbidden Congress so recently in the Guffey case is now denied the individual states with equal force.

Chief Justice Hughes in his restrained dissent merely grabbed at straws in attempting to prove the New York law different from the District of Columbia statute which was invalidated in the famous Adkins decision in 1923. If there are any differences, they are of a highly technical nature and of small importance. All that concerned the majority of the court was that such laws interfere with the so-called "liberty of contract" which is protected by the "due process" of the fifth and fourteenth amendments. Liberty is taking on strange disguises indeed, when a state which tries to prevent an employer from exploiting women is violating the liberty of some sacrosanct individual.

In any federal system worthy of the name, the local government has some powers, the central government has others, but SOME government must have all the powers. Here is a piece of legislation, Whether it is good, bad, or mediocre does not concern us. The point is: Congress cannot pass such a law; the state legislatures cannot pass such a law; and, until America becomes even more drugged than she is now, the Supreme Court can pass no laws at all. Where is sovereignty?

Radicals, in revolt against such a decision, would have us scrap the Constitution or the Court, or both. This extreme solution would doubtlessly create more new problems than it would solve old ones. Still, the wheels of the Constitution are creaking badly. Until "due process" is pried out of the document into which it once crept when no one was watching, both Congress and the legislatures will continue to be irresponsible debating societies, while the nine justices of the Supreme Court carefully carry the key to their padded cell.