AGRICULTURAL RELIEF 
63 
Mr. AsweLL. Will you stand aside a moment and let me ask a 
question? The President, during the last Congress, asked his 
Attorney General for ‘an opinion on the constitutionality of the 
equalization fee, and the Attorney General definitely and specifically 
told the President that it was unconstitutional, and the President 
vetoed it. Now we have the same President and the sane Attorney 
General. If we put the equalization fee up to the President again 
how could he sign it without repudiating the Attorney General? 
The Attorney General would have to get out of the job, would he not? 
Mr. Gray. Why should we worry about that? 
Mr. AsweLL. Iam talking about a practical question. I am asking 
you a practical question. 
Mr. Gray. And we practically dispose of it by saying that is the 
other man’s worry. 
Mr. AsweLL. Then you prefer that we leave in the equalization 
fee when you know in advance positively that he will not sign it? 
Mr. Gray. I do not know that in advance, and I have not agreed 
to that at all. I referred to the land grant colleges here awhile ago. 
If you go back in the Civil War and post-Civil War period you find 
that the act setting up the land grant colleges and universities in this 
Nation went through as strenuous a time to be passed as farm 
relief is going through. It was vetoed by President Buchanan. It 
was declared to be, as judgment then ran, unconstitutional because 
1t was class legislation. Who in this room believes that now? 
Mr. Apkins. Mr. Gray, I have followed very closely Mr. Purnell’s 
questions and your answers to him. If I understand this pinch 
hitter you are talking about, it is proposed by the suggested amend- 
ment that at the initiative of some farm group or cooperative the 
equalization fee might be invoked on some commodity. Is that the 
purport of 1t? 
Mr. Gray. Yes, sir. 
Mr. Apxins. Now, I have thought a great deal of that myself. 
Here is the thought that comes to me, and I want to know what you 
think about it, if you have done much thinking about it. With a 
revolving fund -of $400,000,000 and the board operating with the 
privilege of some commodity groups of cooperatives invoking the 
equalization fee, how many of them do you think would do that when 
they can, with the $400,000,000 so available, have other groups who 
do not want to impose the equalization fee? Do you think they 
would do it? 
Mr. Gray. I was disturbed bv people passing around me. Do 
what, now, please? 
Mr. Apkins. Take, for instance, in my neighborhood, where they 
raise a lot of corn, and they declare an operation period on corn. 
With this pinch-hitter clause in it that you are speaking about the 
cooperatives on corn, under that provision, as I understand it, could 
invoke the use of the equalization fee during their operating period on 
corn. Now the thought that has come to me about the matter is this. 
Would the cooperatives and the corn producers ask to have the 
equalization fee invoked to take care of the loss when they knew that 
the $400,000,000 was available to the producers of all other commodi- 
ties without the fee? The thought came to me what Tom Smith 
would say. Would he not say, “Are not the corn growers entitled 
to it just as much as the wheat growers. the cotton orowers. or