WASHINGTON -- Legislation to rename the Helena-West Helena Federal Courthouse complex for the nation's first Jewish federal judge was approved by the U.S. Senate on Wednesday.
The bill nearly was stalled earlier in the day by Democrats who tried to block a committee from voting because they opposed an unrelated bill on pesticides.
U.S. Sen. John Boozman, a Republican from Rogers, spoke on the Senate floor Wednesday evening about the legislation proposed by Arkansas' congressional delegation. It would name the federal complex at 617 Walnut St. in Helena-West Helena as the Jacob Trieber Federal Building, United States Post Office, and United States Court House.
"Judge Trieber's name will appropriately mark this building and stand as a symbol of his significant work, for not only the people of Arkansas but for the entire United States," Boozman said.
After a 21/2-hour meeting Wednesday morning, Democratic members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee walked out because Chairman James Inhofe, R-Okla., wanted to vote on legislation allowing pesticide exemptions to Clean Water Act permits that hadn't received a full committee hearing.
Without the Democrats, there weren't enough members present to vote on the rest of the scheduled legislation. A quorum is required to vote, which entails at least 11 members.
Inhofe organized a different meeting of the 11 Republican committee members later in the day and approved the rest of the legislation on the schedule by a voice vote. As the minority party, Democrats hold only nine seats.
"It's completely noncontroversial," Boozman said between the meetings. "It's something that everybody feels like is a very well-deserved honor, and the only sad thing is, it's just long overdue. Sometimes the wheels grind slowly, and that's the situation that we're in."
Such meetings aren't common, Boozman spokesman Patrick Creamer said. They are normally reserved for noncontroversial nominations.
"It's not often done with legislation," he said.
Among the legislation approved by Republican members of the committee was a bill to block the Obama administration from implementing new restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.
The Trieber legislation now goes to the House of Representatives.
Born in Prussia (part of the former German Empire) in 1853, Jacob Trieber moved with his parents to St. Louis in 1866 before relocating to Helena in 1868, according to the Arkansas History Commission. Trieber studied law, entered the Arkansas Bar in 1876 and practiced law in Helena.
He was appointed U.S. attorney for the Eastern Arkansas District in 1897, and then was appointed by President William McKinley to the federal bench in Little Rock in 1900.
Trieber is best known for two 1903 rulings involving the "whitecappers," a group similar to the Ku Klux Klan. In United States v. Hodges, 15 whitecappers were actively pressuring companies to fire black workers from a sawmill in Poinsett County. United States v. Morris involved whitecappers terrorizing white landowners who employed black workers in Cross County.
After the Civil War, Congress passed legislation making it a federal crime for two or more people to "conspire to injure, oppress, threaten or intimidate any citizen in the free exercise of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States."
Trieber ruled that the 13th Amendment, which was ratified in 1865 to protect the rights of newly freed slaves, means that all citizens have a right to enter into contracts, such as work, and the whitecappers had violated the law.
In 1906, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Trieber's decision in the Hodges case, stating that the 13th Amendment didn't protect the right to earn a living. For decades, the decision was used to keep the federal government from intervening when racial discrimination occurred.
Eventually, in 1968, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned its own decision in the Hodges case in a footnote of Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer, Co., a case dealing with equal access to housing.
Metro on 08/06/2015