Little Legal Significance Found in Watkins' Group Censure Decisions

Three legal experts last night offered their personal and legal opinions on the significance of the Special Senate Committee's unanimous decision to recommend censuring of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin.

The Committee, headed by Senators Arthur V. Watkins (R-Utah) and Edwin C. Johnson (D-Colo.), urged yesterday that the Senate formally censure McCarthy for his "contemptuous, contumacious, and denunciatory" treatment of a previous committee's investigations of his actions and his "reprehensible treatment" of Brig. Gen. Ralph W. Zwicker last December.

"Criticism for impoliteness"

Law School Professor Robert Braucher pointed out that although the Watkins committee admonished the Wisconson Senator severely, its failure to move censure on any of the other charges submitted by Vermont Senator Ralph E. Flanders "reduces the whole censure proceedings to no more than criticism of McCarthy for his impoliteness."

Braucher and Robert G. McCloskey, associate professor of Government, explained that even if the Senate does vote censure, McCarthy will retain his Senate seat, along with the chairmanship of the Senate's Government Operations Committee and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

However the decision will "hurt him considerably," McCloskey added. "It is another shove on McCarthy's current downhill course." McCloskey felt the de- cision had little legal meaning.

Many people had expected that the Justice Department would prosecute the Wisconsin Senator if the Committee condemned him for urging government employees to inform on any of their superiors whom they suspected of disloyalty. But Arthur E. Sutherland, professor of Law, said that Attorney General Herbert L. Brownell, as the nation's chief law officer can still ask for a Grand jury indiciment against McCarthy.

Both Sutherland and Braucher thought prosecution would be unwise because the privileges of the Senate need safeguarding. They felt such legal action would hurt the balance between the Legislative and the Executive.

Expanding on his remarks that the Watkins group's findings have only limited legal relevance, Braucher called the whole effect cumulative. "The people are tiring of McCarthy and their main emotional feeling is the wish that he would quietly go away," he said.

McCloskey also pointed out that another extra-legal ramification of the McCarthy controversy would be a heightening of our foreign prestige. "Since McCarthy is of central interest to Europeans," McCloskey said, "this action will suggest that he is not running the American show, as many foreigners think or have thought.