Where was the Supreme Court on the McCarthy hearings at the time? Did it make any decisions about them?
I was only about 7 yrs old then.....Watching cartoons I suppose. ( j/k)
https://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/army-mccarthy-hearings
Looks like the Senate took care of him. Prior to Trump people didn't run crying to the Supreme court every hip-stitch, and there was no mass Q-Anon, and conspiracy theories, (that is relatively new stuff....with the advent of trump with Neptune in pisces . Sure there have always been cults here and there, but nothing like mass-hysteria en masse (half the population) like we are seeing today.
The Senate was able to take care of their own back then. Same with Nixon. You did wrong, you were punished. Goodbye! Not today, with the new trump cult.
1954
December 02
Joseph McCarthy condemned by Senate
The
U.S. Senate votes 65 to 22 to condemn Senator
Joseph R. McCarthy for conduct unbecoming of a senator. The condemnation, which was
equivalent to a censure, related to McCarthy’s controversial investigation of
suspected communists in the U.S. government, military and civilian society.
What is known as “McCarthyism” began on February 9, 1950, when McCarthy, a relatively obscure Republican senator from
Wisconsin, announced during a speech in Wheeling,
West Virginia, that he had in his possession a list of 205 communists who had infiltrated the U.S. State Department.
(Sound Familiar like the Obama was born in Kenya stunt??) ...........The
unsubstantiated declaration, which was little more than
a publicity stunt, thrust Senator McCarthy
into the national spotlight. Asked to reveal the names on the list
, the opportunistic senator named just one official who he determined guilty by association: Owen Lattimore, an expert on Chinese culture and affairs who had advised the State Department. McCarthy described Lattimore as the “top Russian spy” in America.
These and other equally
shocking accusations prompted the Senate to form a special committee, headed by Senator Millard Tydings of
Maryland, to investigate the matter. The
committee found little to substantiate McCarthy’s charges, but McCarthy nevertheless touched a nerve in the American public, and during the next two years he made
increasingly sensational charges, even attacking President
Harry S. Truman’s respected former secretary of state,
George C. Marshall.
In 1953, a newly Republican Congress appointed McCarthy chairman of the Committee on Government Operations and its Subcommittee on Investigations, and McCarthyism reached a fever pitch. In widely publicized hearings, McCarthy bullied defendants under cross-examination with unlawful and damaging accusations, destroying the reputations of hundreds of innocent officials and citizens.
In the early months of 1954, McCarthy, who had already lost the support of much of his party because of his controversial tactics, finally overreached himself when he accused several U.S. Army officers of communist subversion. Republican President
Dwight D. Eisenhower pushed for an investigation of McCarthy’s charges, and the televised hearings exposed the senator as a reckless and excessive tyrant who never produced proper documentation for any of his claims.
READ MORE: How Eisenhower Secretly Pushed Back Against McCarthyism
A climax of the hearings came on June 9, when Joseph N. Welch, special attorney for the army, responded to a McCarthy attack on a member of his law firm by facing the senator and tearfully declaring, “Until this moment, senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you no sense of decency?” The crowded hearing room burst into spontaneous applause.
On December 2, after a heated debate, the Senate voted to condemn McCarthy for conduct “contrary to senatorial traditions.” By the time of his death from alcoholism in 1957, the influence of Senator Joseph McCarthy in Congress was negligible