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Show THE THREE-RING CIRCUS 223 Hayden and McFarland devised a new strategy. In addition to their fear of opposition in the committee, they realized that if the project was to be passed by the Eighty-first Congress, the time for action in the House had come. On April 4, 1950, therefore, they began a drive to win House approval, not of the House project bill, but of S. 75, the project legislation which already had passed the Senate. The action precipitated one of the most violent behind-the-scenes fights of the entire session. There was no printed record of the April 4 executive meeting of the House Interior Committee, nor of subse- quent meetings which took place later in the month, but it was no secret that behind the closed doors tempers flared and bitterness colored the arguments. It was the contention of the California members of the committee, Engle and Poulson, that consideration ofS. 75 should be postponed until the President's Water Re- sources Policy Commission made the report which it had been ordered to submit not later than December 1, 1950. This, said Engle and Poulson, would be in accord with the President's request, made in his 1950 budget message, that major changes in federal water and recla- mation policies should be deferred until the commission's recommendations were available. The project bill, declared Engle and Poulson, called for "major changes in feasibility standards." Opposing any such delay, the Arizona forces countered with an attempt to widen the breach between California and the states of the Upper Basin. They charged that California had consistently obstructed or opposed the building of new projects in the Upper |