The Congress: The Last Colony

Over cocktails in Manhattan last week, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko inquired politely of Dean Rusk if Congress was still in session. Yes, it is, said the U.S. Secretary of State, explaining that it was dealing with home rule in the District of Columbia. Quipped Rusk: “It’s one of our last vestiges of colonialism.”

What Rusk and other Administration officials could not foresee was that Lyndon Johnson’s mighty efforts to end the capital’s colonial status would come to naught. In one of the rare and least expected setbacks dealt him by the docile 89th Congress, the House last week killed Johnson’s bill to give the District of Columbia the right to elect its own public officials and run its own affairs—a privilege last enjoyed in the federal city in 1874.

Lost Touch? In view of Johnson’s virtually unbroken string of legislative coups, the bill’s defeat quickly became the talk of Washington and beyond.

Was Lyndon losing his touch? Not really. But as old Capitol Hill Veteran Johnson well knows, Congress grows balkier with every day a session drags on beyond Labor Day—and adjournment is not yet in sight. While home rule for Washington is an endlessly controversial topic, congressional unrest undoubtedly contributed to defeat of Lyndon’s bill.

A home-rule bill sailed through the Senate with ease. But when a similar bill finally reached the House floor, it had been considerably diluted in an effort to gain support for passage. Furthermore, once debate began, the House Democratic leadership saw its forces —split over how much more of the bill to concede—begin to break ranks. As they did, the anti-home-rule coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats quickly took command. As on countless previous occasions when similar bills have come up, opposition to home rule was largely rooted in congressional fears that the nation’s only predominantly Negro (62%) major city would elect a predominantly Negro government.

Dead Duck. Fractured and fragmented, the Administration supporters fell apart. In the end, the House adopted by a vote of 227 to 174 a substitute bill proposed by California Democrat B. F. (for Bernie Frederic) Sisk, who, though normally an Administration trusty, thought he had a better formula. The Sisk bill simply postpones the issue by providing that the home-rule question be put to a vote of District residents within 100 days. If approved, an elected charter board would have 210 days in which to draft a plan for city government; this in turn would have to be approved in a citywide referendum. If passed, the charter would then go to Congress for its approval or rejection.

Concluded House Democratic Leader Carl Albert: “Home rule is a dead duck this session.”

Last week Congress also:

> Approved, in the House, a two-step pay raise for 1,800,000 federal employees, excluding members of Congress. Under the measure, federal workers would get an across-the-board, 4% raise this year and a larger increase in 1966 based on cost-of-living increases and wage trends in private industry. Estimated cost of the bill with both raises in effect: $1.5 billion a year. President Johnson had recommended a 3% raise that would have cost $406 million a year. The bill now goes to the Senate, which is expected to heed Johnson’s warning that the House measure could wreck his noninflationary wage-price policy.

> Advanced, in a squeaker 7-6 vote of the House Rules Committee, the Administration’s hotly pressed highway-beautification bill, which would require states to remove billboards from beside all interstate highways and primary roads outside commercial areas, and screen or remove junkyards and car dumps.

> Completed, in both the House and Senate, action on the immigration bill that overturns the 41-year-old national-origins quota system and allows any country outside the Western Hemisphere to send up to 20,000 immigrants to the U.S. annually, up to a total of 170,000 persons a year. Nations in the Western Hemisphere will be permitted to send a total of 120,000 immigrants a year. Leaping at the opportunity for yet another dramatic signing, President Johnson immediately announced that he would affix his signature to the landmark measure at—where else?—the Statue of Liberty.