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Down on the Farm. Last year, in the final hectic days of the 85th Congress, Rules Chairman Smith took no chances on being forced by a committee petition to call hearings. As a dozen major bills -relief for depressed areas, housing, mineral subsidies, etc. -piled up before Rules, Howard Smith simply disappeared from Washington. He returned a week later, smilingly explained that he had had some hay down on his farm that needed tending. Says he today: "There were about a dozen things thrown at the Rules Committee, and they would have cost the taxpayers about $10 billion. There was no way on God's earth to prevent them from coming out if the committee met. That's why I went away."
But Judge Smith is not always so obstructive, and even his methods pall before those of some previous Rules chairmen, e.g., Illinois' Adolph Sabath, who used to feign fainting fits to get hearings adjourned. On the vast majority of bills Smith works closely with Rayburn or McCormack in speeding the legislative process.
"The newspapers raise a lot of hell about how arbitrary we are," says Smith. "But we grant thousands of rules while denying one." Moreover, the Rules Committee can be -and is -used by the leadership to bottle up irresponsible legislation for which Congressmen may be politically committed to vote if it reaches the floor. "Many, many times." says Howard Smith, "members have told me that they were going to speak publicly for a bill, and if it got out on the floor they would have to vote for it, but they were against the bill and wanted it killed by the Rules Committee."
Generals on Horseback. In the strange person of Chairman Clarence Cannon the House's polarization of power reaches its extremes in the Appropriations Committee, which can send its bills to the floor without going through Rules. Speaker Rayburn cordially dislikes Cannon, a sentiment which is more than reciprocated. Yet somehow the two old men, each playing by the House rules, seem to balance each other. In 1950, when Appropriations Committee Chairman Cannon pushed his pet "one-package" appropriations bill (all main appropriations in one lump sum so the world could see the awful enormity of it all) through the House, an irate member complained bitterly to Rayburn. Mister Sam only shook his head. "I can't do a thing with Cannon," he said. "He's the most powerful man in the House." Yet the very next year, Chairman Cannon could not even get his one-package bill reported out of his own committee. Muttered he gloomily: "Sam packed the committee against me."