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Show 128 WAR FOR THE COLORADO RIVER would have been understandable. Instead, they elected to stand their ground before the overwhelming force, and the farce that was dignified with the appellation of a Senate hearing began. In a court of law a change of venue would have been requested. In the Senate no such safeguard was available. The Senate was master of its own destiny. Its members could sit as both judge and jury in the consideration of their own acts. So three of them sat together that June morning, their minds comfortably ensconced in unanimity, the decision they would render already engraved indestructibly upon the Senate calendar. They were faced with only the aggravating duty of listening, under the provisions of constitutional guarantees and theoretical democratic processes, to sparrows scolding an eagle that was un- touchable on the highest peak of the land. The mockery would continue through six days, and most of that time only Senator Watkins would be present to conduct the proceedings for the committee - alone as temporary chairman, alone to decide what went into the record and what did not go in, alone to question witnesses. First off, into the record went S. 1555, calling for four major dams and fifteen irrigation projects.139 Next went in President Eisenhower's statement of March 20, recommending the crsp.140 Then came the crsp bill which the administration preferred, asking for only two big dams and eleven irrigation projects.141 The com- mittee would pay no more attention to the adminis- ration bill than it would to the California witnesses or the conservationists. One of the first witnesses was big, ruddy-faced Senator Edwin C. Johnson of Colorado. Millikin, |