The Congress: The Three-Second Symbol

The Constitution provides that during a session of Congress neither house may “adjourn for more than three days.” Last week, accordingly, both houses went through the motion of meeting a couple of times. One token meeting of the Senate, with two members present, lasted just three seconds — a speed rec ord of sorts. The week’s performance, which included a July 4th holiday, might stand as a symbol of the 88th Congress — the do-nothingest of modern times.

The No. 1 Goal. The 88th has passed and sent to the President only four items of legislation. One was a measure lifting the already much-raised ceiling on the national debt. The others merely continued existing arrangements: the draft, the Korean war corporation and excise taxes, and the livestock feed-grains program.

The tax-revision bill, still proclaimed as the New Frontier’s No. 1 legislative goal of 1963, is not expected to emerge from the House Ways and Means Committee until some time in August, far behind schedule. And the Senate Finance Committee will not even begin to hold hearings on a tax bill until after Ways and Means has completed its work.

More agreeable to some kinds of New Frontier legislation than the House, the Senate has passed the Administration’s bill to help state and local governments develop mass-transportation facilities. It has also approved a Kennedy bill to set up a Youth Conservation Corps, plus a “home town” youth employment program. In the House, however, both measures seem likely to linger in the Rules Committee, headed by Virginia Democrat Howard W. Smith. The Senate also passed the Administration’s area redevelopment bill, but the House voted it down.

“I’m Pessimistic.” President Kennedy cannot even cherish much hope that his proposals will do better during the rest of the session. The prospect, indeed, is that his difficulties with Congress will worsen as a result of his civil rights bill. In the Senate, a Southern filibuster is certain, and while it lasts, all other legislation will be stalled. Whatever the outcome of the battle, Southerners in Congress are going to be at odds with the President and disinclined to go along with his other requests. “Civil rights,” says a White House aide, “has changed the whole situation in the House. It directly and adversely affects the rest of the program. All bets are off. It’s a whole new session. I’m pessimistic.”

The New Frontier is fond of blaming the Republicans for the 88th’s balkiness. And it is true that the Republicans in Congress, especially in the House, have displayed rare unity this year in opposing the President. Of the 178 Republicans in the House, only one went along with Kennedy’s latest request for an increase in the debt ceiling, and only one voted for the Administration feed-grains bill.

But what thwarts the President’s wishes on Capitol Hill is not so much Republican unity as Democratic disunity. There are lopsided Democratic majorities in both houses: 67 to 33 in the Senate and 256 to 178 in the House (one seat, last held by a Democrat, is vacant). Not since the Democratic high tide in the 1930s has a President enjoyed such a huge numerical advantage in Congress.

A Lack of Commitment. Part of the trouble is with the Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill. The top House Democrat, John McCormack of Massachusetts, was long a slashingly effective floor leader, but he has been inhibited by his present role as Speaker. Senate Democratic Leader Mike Mansfield is generally conceded to be too nice a fellow to engage in the arm-twisting tactics his job requires.

But far more, President Kennedy himself is to blame for the record of the 88th. The G.O.P. unity that New Frontiersmen grumble about is in part a response to Kennedy’s incessant partisanship, his overzealous efforts to play politics with legislation. Kennedy, furthermore, has hurt some of his own most-heralded proposals. For example, he blurred the prospects for tax revision by submitting a budget with an $11.9 billion deficit.

Another reason why President Kennedy’s welfare-state legislative proposals sometimes generate scant enthusiasm in Congress is that he himself often seems to have little genuine enthusiasm for them. He often conveys an impression that he is operating as a political technician, asking not what the measures can do for the country but what proposing them can do for him politically. Lacking, or seeming to lack, any real commitment to his welfare proposals, the President sometimes fails to give them sustained support. “He sends up one message after another,” says a congressional Republican, “and then forgets about them.”

What is needed to get Congress moving again is not more Democrats in Congress, as Kennedy argues, but more leadership among Democrats.