THE CONGRESS: Sad Little Session

The 86th Congress passed away whimpering. The short, post-convention summer session ordered by the Democratic leadership to make campaign hay turned into a Democratic fiasco. Bill after bill was either stopped dead or hacked to pieces by a disciplined coalition of Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats. Dick Nixon would not have to explain away any awkward presidential vetoes during his campaign, because President Eisenhower had not had to use his veto.* Although on adjourning Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson and House Speaker Sam Rayburn pointed with customary pride, they could not camouflage the failure.

Jack Kennedy, angry and frustrated by his inability to force through even one pet project, was left empty-handed and—far worse—derided by the Republicans for failure to rally the overwhelming Democratic majorities behind his program. In the last fitful week, two more of Kennedy’s cherished bills—the minimum-wage extension and the school aid bill—went down the drain. Kennedy himself was head of the Senate delegation that went to a Senate-House conference committee trying to work out a compromise between his own version of the minimum-wage bill (boosting wages from $1 to $1.25 per hour, extending coverage to 4,000,000 jobholders) and the House bill ($1.15 minimum wage, extension to 1,400,000 workers). He faced an implacable coalition of conservatives. Their terms: the House bill or nothing. Rather than accept the scaled-down version and run the risk of a heavy lambasting from organized labor. Kennedy settled for nothing, let both bills die in conference.

Ducking a Dilemma. The school construction measure was landlocked in the House Rules Committee. Again Jack Kennedy faced a dismaying dilemma: the Senate version, appropriating nearly twice the money ($1.8 billion) offered by the House, authorized special federal funds to raise teachers’ salaries—a mouth-watering campaign plum. The House bill contained nothing for the teachers, but it did have Adam Clayton Powell’s familiar monkey wrench: an amendment restricting the construction money to integrated schools. With the promise of a vote, if necessary, from Arkansas’ James Trimble, Kennedy’s adherents on the Rules Committee had the strength to get the House bill out, if Kennedy gave the word.

But in the Senate, the Powell Amendment would have brought on a Southern filibuster. Had Kennedy labored to get the amendment dropped in conference committee, he would have antagonized Negro voters. Kennedy was content to see the bill die, passed the word to Trimble to do nothing. He thereby avoided needlessly antagonizing teachers, Negroes and Southerners.

The dying Congress was not only rough on the Democrats, it also deliberately defied President Eisenhower. After the 21 nation Organization of American States condemned Dictator Trujillo’s Dominican Republic for aggression and called for sanctions against it (TIME, Aug. 29), Ike needed authorization to cut imports of Dominican sugar to the U.S. The Senate obligingly voted unrestricted authority to the President, but the House capriciously insisted that he would have to wait until the OAS members formally invoked sanctions. In a schizoid mood, neither House nor Senate would budge, and the new sugar bill died with the Congress. Ike was left with two possible recourses: 1) to invoke special emergency powers to permit him to cut off the sugar, or 2) to postpone any import of sugar whatsoever until New Year’s Eve, thus allowing only the tiniest trickle of Dominican sugar into the country. If the Congress decided that either action was illegal, grumped Ike, “let them impeach me.”

In its last days, the Congress also:

¶ Sent to the White House a stopgap housing bill providing $500 million more in loans to colleges for new dormitories, extending FHA insurance for unsecured loans for home improvements beyond the Oct. 1 expiration date, and tacking on $50 million in new loans for municipal public facilities.

¶Appropriated $3,787,350,000 in foreign aid, which President Eisenhower approved, even though it was nearly $500 million under his original request.

*One exception: the President vetoed a bill providing federal subsidies for small producers of lead and zinc, who have been hit hard by declining prices.