Congress' Week

Congress' job-of-the-week was the budget total. Coats off and sleeves up, the G.O.P. leaders whacked away at President Harry Truman's $37.5 billion request.

In the House, Republican bosses wanted a $6 billion bite and no buts. As their proposal hit the floor with a take-it-or-leave-it rule barring amendments. Appropriations Committee Chairman John Tabor whipped the Republicans into line. He got fervent support from Missouri's Dewey Short, who opened an attack on New Deal spending by disdaining the microphone and bawling: "I never did like to speak through a tin horn. It's like kissing a beautiful girl through a screen door."

A Democratic attempt to send the bill back for rehearing was bowled over (231-to-166) while Minority Leader Sam Rayburn cried: "Everybody knows this figure [$6 billion] was picked out of the air." Everyone also knew that any legislative ceiling on expenditures was just a wishful hope and no more than a moral obligation, once the appropriation bills started coming.

But the G.O.P. was adamant. By a 239-to-159 vote, with Maine's Margaret Chase Smith the only recalcitrant Republican, the House approved the $6 billion slash and sent it on to the Senate.

There, Republicans were divided and moved more cautiously. Senators Robert Taft and Arthur Vandenberg swung their weight behind Finance Chairman Eugene Milliken's proposal for a $4.5 billion cut. Their most potent argument: the effect of a larger cut on U.S. military strength (see The Nation). President pro tem Vandenberg took the floor to warn his colleagues: "Any lapse in our purpose or resources . . . will be an open invitation to Soviet Russia to fill the vacuum. . . . We dare not present to the world a picture of Uncle Sam with a chip on each shoulder and both arms in a sling."

Between rounds of the fight, Congress: P:Sent to the White House a bill to exempt from federal taxation the $8.5 million Rockefeller gift to U.N.

P:Sent to joint Senate-House conference the bill to extend indefinitely wartime excise tax rates.

P:Prepared for Senate action on the House-passed bill limiting presidential tenure to two full terms (or one, if he had served part of a previous term).

In the midst of all the bustle, Congressmen found time to listen to an old friend. Blowing into town from Salida, Colo., bearded 82-year-old Prospector Frank E. Gimlett--who regularly turns up before Congress--clumped up to the Hill to tell Congress what was wrong with the country. His judgment this year: too few gold and silver coins; too many labor unions.

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