THE CONGRESS: The Nixon and Mills Bill

If the House of Representatives supports HR 1, the nation will make dramatic progress toward helping poor families obtain dignity and opportunity through work training, services and income support. However, if the House of Representatives rejects Title IV of HR 1, or defeats the bill, we will be committed to perpetuation of a system that is an obsolete and demoralizing failure.

In his letter to Speaker of the House Carl Albert and Republican Minority Leader Gerald Ford. President Nixon underscored the significance he attached to the primary domestic project of his presidential term. The bill, designated the first piece of legislation introduced in the 92nd Congress, aims at the most important overhauling of the welfare system since the beginning of the dole. Its key section is Title IV, which calls for the end of the present Rube Goldbergian structure and in its place the establishment of Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan, setting a guaranteed annual income of $2,400 for a family of four.

Nixon’s chief spokesman in the floor fight was a most unusual ally: Wilbur Mills, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, an old-line Democrat and an inveterate Nixon critic. Mills decided nearly two years ago that Nixon would make telling points against the Democrats in the 1970 elections and the 1972 presidential campaign if the Democrats tried to block this striking new program for the poor, particularly since such blockage would be tantamount to approval of the present welfare structure. Mills pushed the bill through the House once, but it failed enactment because of the chaos in the Senate at last year’s session end. This year Mills put the bill on top of his priority list—hence the label HR 1—and determined to guarantee the Democrats a major voice in its drafting.

Thus it was Mills who worked out the intricacies of the formidable 687-page document, and who echoed Nixon’s sentiments in an impassioned yet closely reasoned speech before his colleagues. “I must take it,” Mills said, “that those of you who would vote to strike Title IV from the bill feel that the present chaotic mess is preferable to what we have in the bill.” Mills’ either-or proposition was enough to sway borderline Congressmen. By a vote of 234-187 the House voted down a motion to scratch Title IV from the omnibus bill, then approved it entirely, 288-132. The bill will now go before the Senate for its consideration.

Battle Lines. The legislation was designed to lift the burden of the nation’s welfare system from the states and bring it under tight rein by the Federal Government. Except for the notion of a guaranteed annual income, the measure contained proposals on which most Congressmen ultimately agreed. Among them: a 5% increase in Social Security benefits and the federalizing of the welfare programs for the aged, the blind and the disabled.

But it was at Title IV that the House battle lines were drawn. Pitted against Nixon, Mills and their supporters was an even odder alliance of archconservatives and radical liberals. The conservatives, led by doughty William Colmer, 81, of Mississippi, saw the measure as the first leg of a precipitous journey toward a socialist state. To them, passage of such a bill would signal the ultimate destruction of American capitalism. The liberals, whose most eloquent spokesman was Ron Dellums, a black freshman Congressman from Berkeley, Calif., argued that the $2,400 figure was below the poverty level for a family of four.

As chairman of the powerful Rules

Committee, Colmer was by far the more formidable foe. In behind-the-scenes negotiations with Mills, Colmer said that he would agree to a closed rule on HR 1 —prohibiting amendments—provided that the Ways and Means Committee would allow one motion from the floor to strike Title IV. When debate opened up, Colmer made persuasive use of a familiar scare tactic. “In my judgment.” he intoned, “we have reached the forks of the road. We either are going to continue down the path that has made this country the envy of the world under the free-enterprise system or travel the other fork of political expediency —a guaranteed annual income.” From the liberal vantage point, Dellums decried the Family Assistance Plan as a “feeble and ludicrous response to the plight of the poor, given the economic realities of today. We must establish a base,” he said, “below which no person should be required to live, and that base must reflect economic realities and human dignity.”

Sharing Credit. In the end, however, the specter of the present disastrous welfare system overrode the fears expressed by conservatives and the sense of inadequacies raised by liberals, and Mills had his way. He hammered at this theme through most of his speech, implanting firmly in the minds of those members the point that there would be no other legislation in this field introduced during the current session. It was the Nixon plan—or nothing. Now an equally thundering battle is anticipated in the Senate. Although he is cool toward the bill, Senator Russell Long, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, promised that he would move it to the floor in some form. Should it pass the Senate this fall, the program will represent the Nixon Administration’s most telling domestic triumph—but one for which he will have to share the credit with Mills and the Democrats.