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Show 148 WAR FOR THE COLORADO RIVER "It's pretty hard on those of us who are not lawyers to understand what is going on here.176 I would like to have started out ... by trying to determine whether there is any water in the Colorado River. If we determine there is water in the river, if we then deter- mine that the project is feasible, we would then pass a bill, and by the passage of that bill we would probably create the very situation that has been referred to, and might create a justiciable issue, in which case perhaps the resolution might follow" This was sheer hypocrisy, simply the deceptive scheme McFarland - and indeed O'Mahoney - had in mind. Get a bill out, then let the chips fall where they may. It wouldn't matter then, for the Supreme Court resolu- tion was already a dead duck, and everybody knew that to be true. Shaw stubbornly refused to yield or to succumb to the contrived battering. "The question is," he said firmly, "to whom does the water belong? Those ques- tions are legal questions, and they are the legal issues we have to settle, and can only settle in court." 177 O'Mahoney adjourned the session. Senate committees ordinarily did not meet on Satur- days, but O'Mahoney kept the hearing on S. 75 going on Saturday, March 26, 1949, and summoned to the witness chair E. G. Nielson, Reclamation Bureau engi- neer from Boulder City, Nevada. Nielson had a pre- pared statemnt for himself and two other Bureau engi- neers, N. B. Bennett, Jr., and V. E. Larson.178 Thereupon followed several days of the most con- fusing and incomprehensible testimony of record, hardly more than a squabble between senators who knew little or nothing about engineering or law, witnesses who |