Pork Chops & Bacon

The Senate last week considered the biggest rivers and harbors bill of all time. In the bill were many sound, far-reaching (and long-deferred) projects for flood control, harbor improvement and power development. In it also were many Senators' pets: long-deferred local-improvement schemes.

Republican Policymaker Bob Taft, with his eye on pledges of economy, wanted to cut about $200 million out of the bill. Candidate Taft, admitting that his stand was "unwise politically," pleaded for Congress to go slow on public spending at a time when foreign aid and military commitments were making heavy demands on the Treasury and the nation's economy. One Democrat--Virginia's Harry Byrd--joined him, warned of deficits and of "an increase in taxes which will shake the private-enterprise system to its very foundations." Kansas' Republican Clyde Reed called the bill "an outrageous pork barrel," charged that most of the Senators had put projects into it regardless of necessity or urgency.

But the Senate listened hardest to South Dakota's Republican Chan Gurney. Sure, he agreed, it was "a stupendous pork barrel . . . but it will put pork chops and bacon and roast pork on millions of dinner tables." The Senators had added more than $101 million to the bill the House had already passed. But they had a good excuse for throwing economy out the window. The bill's whopping total--$640,253,200--was still about $25 million under the Administration's budget estimate. An overwhelming voice vote rolled the barrel to passage.

Last week the Senate also:

P: Defeated, by 5140-20, a move to bring statehood for Hawaii to a vote.

P: Failed, by four votes, to override Harry Truman's veto of a bill which would have made presidential appointments to the Atomic Energy Commission subject to a loyalty check by the FBI.

P: Got set for speedy action on Arthur Vandenberg's resolution for U.S. association in regional mutual-defense arrangements, such as Europe's Western Union (TIME, May 24).

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