The first known reference to a "catfish amendment" is from 1957.
As Dome speculated earlier, a minimum wage bill in that year's legislative session may have helped popularize the phrase. We've now tracked down that story.
In an unsigned article in the N&O on April 17, Lumberton Sen. Cutlar Moore is quoted complaining about changes made to a bill to boost the minimum wage to 75 cents an hour.
There was a fisherman, he said, who was having difficulty skinning a catfish which squirmed frantically under the knife.
"Finally," Moore said, "this fellow said, 'Hold still little catfish. All I'm going to do is gut you.'"
The amendments exempted hotel and laundry workers, firms with fewer than five employees, children under 18 and those who work fewer than 18 hours a week. They "chopped the bill down to a mere shell of its former self," the article notes.
It's possible that the phrase "catfish amendment" was already in use by then, and the joke was certainly not original. But the high profile of the minimum wage bill and the numerous amendments make it a plausible candidate.
The full text of the 1957 article after the jump.
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Amendments fired at wage bill
The News & Observer, April 17, 1957.
Looking more dead than alive, Governor Hodges' 75 cents an hour minimum wage bill staggered out of a Senate committee with a favorable report yesterday.
Amendments had chopped the bill down to a mere shell of its former self.
"They gutted it," growled Robeson's Senator Cutlar Moore, chairman of the Senate Committee on Manufacturing, Labor and Commerce.
Amendments flew thick and fast, removing one group of workers after another from provisions of the minimum wage proposal. The amendments had solid backing in an unshakable 5-4 alignment.
Lenoir's John Dawson offered one exempting hotel workers from the bill.
Carlyle Rutledge of Cabarrus came in with another taking out laundry employees.
Hertford's William Copeland got approval of an amendment making the bill inapplicable to an employer whose total number of employes does not exceed five persons.
Dawson suggested that the bill not apply to children under 18 years of age, and the amenders put it through.
Copeland failed in an effort to give minimum wage coverage only to employes who worked as much as 25 hours a week, but he succeeded with a similar 18 hour amendment.
Copeland's rash of amendments reminded chairman Cutlar Moore of a story.
There was a fisherman, he said, who was having difficulty skinning a catfish which squirmed frantically under the knife.
"Finally," Moore said, "this fellow said, 'Hold still little catfish. All I'm going to do is gut you.'"
Some bill was better than none at all, Cutlar Moore reckoned. "At least they left the cover on it," he declared.
As originally drawn, the minimum wage bill would have covered some 91,100 workers in the State, according to estimates of the State Labor department.
Labor Commissioner Frank Crane estimated that about half of that number were taken out by yesterday's amendments. One amendment alone chopped out 14,800 laundry workers.
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