The Congress: The First Session

In the predawn moments of a long Washington night, a handful of U.S. Senators wound up the business of the 87th Congress’ first session in a mood of frustration and anger.

The 87th had labored hard and long—longer, in fact, than any Congress since the Korean War session of 1951. It voted the biggest appropriations in U.S. peacetime history—some $95.8 billion. But the distinguishing feature of the 87th Congress lay not in the hours it worked or the money it spent. Rather, what set the 87th apart was the fact that it was dominated by the House of Representatives, long dubbed the lower branch. In exercising its leadership the House often thwarted the will not only of the Senate but of the man in the White House.

The Folks at Home. After the 1960 elections, the Senate, with a 64-10-36 Democratic majority, figured to be—and was—pretty much a rubber stamp for the Kennedy Administration. But the House was a different matter.

In the elections, no fewer than 303 of the House’s 437 members received more votes than John Kennedy in their home districts. Such Congressmen could reasonably consider themselves to be better judges than the President of the desires of their constituencies. The House was more than willing to follow Kennedy’s lead in matters of national defense—and it appropriated $46.6 billion toward building up the nation’s military strength. But it was the hallmark of the 1961 House of Representatives that it went its own way—or at least that of the folks back home —on domestic issues.

The 1961 session began with a Pyrrhic victory for the Administration. Hoping to clear the way for New Frontier legislation, the Administration pushed through a resolution aimed at “liberalizing” the powerful House Rules Committee. But if that move had any visible effect, it was only to push conservative Southerners, led by Rules Chairman Howard Smith of Virginia, into closer coalition with the Republican minority under Indiana’s Charles Halleck.

Toward Trouble. There were signs from the start of the troubles that were to come in the House. In its first major legislative act, the Senate overwhelmingly approved $394 million in new aid to depressed areas; the House finally endorsed the bill too, but only after a hard fight and only after the Administration had agreed to sweeten the measure with extra benefits for the congressional districts. Similarly, the House once voted down the Administration’s bill to raise the minimum wage from $1 to $1.25 an hour; the measure was accepted only after laundry workers (who do not, after all, form much of a voting bloc in most constituencies) were excluded from coverage. The Administration’s major triumph came on a measure well calculated to please the constituent-conscious Congressmen. It was a sprawling, $6 billion, pork-barrel housing bill, covering both low-and middle-income groups in both urban and rural areas.

After the housing bill, the Administration had nothing but problems with the House. Such was the House’s obvious opposition to the New Frontier’s program for medical care for the aged that the Administration gave up the fight, and the bill languished to the end in the House Ways & Means Committee. The Administration’s proposals for tax reform also wound up in a Ways & Means pigeonhole. And on the Rules Committee, Virginia’s Judge Smith had his revenge: Rules killed the bill that John Kennedy had placed at the very top of his domestic priority list—aid to education, which got cruelly mauled in a dispute about whether it should cover both public and parochial schools.

Forced Settlement. Of all the many instances in which the House of Representatives insisted on having its own way against both Senate and Administration pressures, none was more significant than the fight over foreign aid. The Kennedy Administration urgently sought a bill authorizing long-term financing for foreign aid, and the Senate approved. But the House, in a stunning defeat for the Administration, in effect required that the White House return to Capitol Hill each year for foreign-aid appropriations.

Again, the Administration had requested $4.8 billion in foreign-aid appropriations for the next fiscal year, and the Senate had approved $4.2 billion. In a Senate-House conference committee, the Senate’s representatives were determined to hold out for at least $4 billion.

But the House members, led by Louisiana’s Democratic Representative Otto Passman, an implacable enemy of foreign aid, fought a bitter week’s delaying action, finally forcing a settlement of $3.87 billion.

An Outrage. As its last act, the House shouted its approval of a catchall $1 billion appropriations bill and then, under a permissive resolution already sent over by the Senate,* headed for home. That left the money bill before the Senate on a like-it-or-lump-it basis—and the Senate did not like it at all. For one thing, the House-approved bill knocked out the backdoor financing provisions in four major Administration measures. For another, the House had deleted a proposal to increase each Senator’s office payroll by $5,000. But about all the Senate could do was sputter. Cried Republican Leader Everett Dirksen: “This is indeed an outrage perpetrated on the Senate.” Democratic Whip Hubert Humphrey threatened reprisal at the next session: “We’re going to have some legislative regurgitation.” Cried Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, normally mild to a fault: “We have taken a shellacking, and I think it’s outrageous.” Then the Senate, faced by the House fait accompli, swallowed hard, approved the bill, and adjourned.

The first session of the Syth Congress was thus one in which the U.S. House of Representatives, its members far more influenced by the signs from their own home districts than by the signals from the White House, placed its own stamp on the legislative record. And last week, when the gavels went down to end the session, the Congressmen began fanning out across the land to look for the signs that would shape U.S. politics and policies in Election Year 1962.

* The U.S. Constitution specifies that “neither House, during the Session of Congress, shall, without the consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days.”