Word: congress
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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DEMOCRATISM is hostile to Congress, Burnham contends, because Congress, as the founding fathers intended, does not directly represent the majority will. What emerges from Congress is a composite of the "specific interests, goals, values, ideals and sentiments" of citizens in the various states and congressional districts. Through the slow-paced committee system that critics of Congress carp at, Congress hears all sides, compromises the conflicts, takes the interests of minorities into account, arrives at "an adjustment and balancing of needs, interests and aims...
...Congress, says Burnham, is "the one major curb on the soaring executive and the unleashed bureaucracy." Rights and liberties written into law "have no practical meaning" unless there is an independent institutional power to uphold the law against the claims and encroachments of the executive power. Lacking any popular mandate, the courts are not powerful enough to withstand the executive power without Congress' help. "No Congress," he warns, "no liberty...
...imagine a newspaper announcing that the Russians had organized a unit to send a man to hell. The next morning there would be two or three federal agencies around with budget figures, public relations staffs pounding on the walls of Congress saying, 'We can't let 'em beat...
Stanford University's linear accelerator, for which President Eisenhower is asking Congress to appropriate $100 million (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), will be the most spectacular addition yet to the growing array of instruments science has devised to probe the atom...
Stanford already has a linear accelerator 220 ft. long that turns out electrons with 700 million electron volts. The projected two-mile installation is expected to generate electrons with 15 billion volts at the start. Later, the scientists hope, it can be souped up to 40 billion volts. If Congress votes the money which the President wants, the accelerator should go into operation in about six years...