Back to Work

The 81st Congress came back to Capitol Hill this week with politics on its mind and blood in its eye. At stake this year was more than the unfinished business on the Fair Deal agenda. With 36 Senators and the entire 435-member House facing the voters again next November, the prize was control of the 82nd Congress and a long head start toward the White House in 1952.

Even before the opening-session gavels fell, the air was rife with the shuffling and stomping of party leaders maneuvering for position. The Administration's tactics were: shoot the works, even on such issues as the Brannan Plan and Taft-Hartley repeal, which had little chance of passage, but would presumably make prime political ammunition later on. Administration leaders would plug hard to extend and increase social security, to jar the federal aid-to-education bill loose from the House Education and Labor Committee, to make Congress stand up and be counted on the compulsory health-insurance program.

Old Business. The Administration's primary ambition in the second session was not to take up new business, but to attend to old business--the leftovers of the last session, the measures that had been rejected or not taken up.

In the Senate the threat of filibuster hung over at least three measures: repeal of the federal tax on oleomargarine (by dairy state Senators); civil rights (by the Dixiecrats); a revised D.P. bill (by Nevada's one-man roadblock, Pat McCarran). In both Houses one of the warmest debates would come over taxes and the new budget, which was giving concern even to some staunch Administration Democrats. Majority Leader Scott Lucas hopefully predicted a cut of $1 billion in foreign aid and $2 billion in military spending. Illinois' rising Freshman Senator Paul Douglas, a Fair Dealer, wanted to trim the budget by $4.5 billion.

Wherrymandering. But the hottest fight of all was building up within the ranks of the Republican Party. All through the last two sessions of Congress, it had been Michigan's Arthur Vandenberg who had beaten back the attacks of the isolationists within his own party. But his recent, critical operation had left Vandenberg tired and weakened, and there was an ominous rumbling of activity from among Republicans who had consistently fought the bipartisan foreign policy on EGA, the Atlantic Treaty and the military-assistance program.

Arriving early in Washington last week, Nebraska's Floor Leader Kenneth Wherry put the rumblings into words. From now on, Wherry announced, he would refuse to be bound by the decisions made by "bipartisan bigwigs." He proposed that all new foreign commitments be hauled down to the floor of the Senate for a full-dress brawl--a proposal which the Christian Science Monitor denounced as an attempt to "Wherrymander" U.S. foreign policy.

All of this meant that foreign-aid programs would have heavy going: they would be fought not only by their familiar opponents, but by the money savers too. A Congress anxious to get back to the voters would have a hard time getting out of Washington before midsummer.

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