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Show A STACKED COMMITTEE 155 House floor, gave Watkins fits. He couldn't very well go charging into the Supreme Court and tell the justices they were a bunch of dunderheads, but he could raise hell with the Rules Committee, and he did. The results of his accusation that the Rules Committee had sold out to California were, however, negative. Tough words came suddenly from the home of Presi- dent Eisenhower's wife and his mother-in-law. The Denver Post indicted the Republican Party for selling the Upper Basin down the Colorado River in behalf of California. Evidently California had been laboring under the misapprehension that the reverse was true, that the administration had ignored its arguments in favor of the President's favorite trout fishing area. It was learned in time that what had set the Post off was the rejection by the House of the Frying Pan Project, which would have taken water out of the upper tributaries of the Colorado River, transported it over the Rockies, and let it run down the eastern slope. According to the Post, rejecting this bill was a "scurrilous compromise," and it was "vaporous nonsense" to blame the action on Demo- cratic opposition, as some Republicans were wont to do. The situation, said the Post, made the crsp a "dead pigeon." 173 The newspaper termed the leadership of the Interior Department "somewhat short of inspiring," and blistered the House members who had voted against the Frying Pan bill as "men of little vision, less faith, and no curiosity," adding that they "had let themselves become pawns in a dirty game of inter-regional political con- troversy by which the people of one area would over- power and profit from the people of another. |