Somebody Please Explain

Tom Connally's Joint Senate Committee had another go at the hashed-up resolution on troops to Europe. Hauling back into committee the resolution they had unanimously approved only the week before (TIME, March 19), they managed to unhash one point. The resolution came back out with a positive declaration: the Senate approved adding four more U.S. divisions to the two already in Europe. But the section which seems to require congressional approval before the President sends any more troops after that was still muddy and obscure.

The committeemen had tried their best to put their thoughts in a word. They had tried four different ones: consult, collaborate, approve, authorize. They had settled finally on approve. But what did it mean exactly? Was congressional action supposed to be absolutely binding on the President? Would it mean that Congress would have to vote its specific approval before another battalion could be sent abroad? Did it apply to Air Force and naval units as well as ground forces? Even Republicans, who had insisted on the clause and the word, could not be sure.

On the floor of the Senate, New York's Republican Irving Ives pleaded politely: "I would like somebody to explain it." Wisconsin's Republican Wiley waved to New Jersey's Republican Smith (actual author of the clause), who indicated that he was not sure himself, but that after he made up his mind he would undertake to explain. Massachusetts' Republican Saltonstall made a stab at it; still New York's Ives said plaintively: "The Senator from New York just doesn't know what this means."

Neither did anyone else, even after Smith cleared his throat this week and allowed as how the clause was "an invitation to the President to collaborate." The Great Debate, now down to a low-order exercise in semantics, rolled interminably on.

The Senate also:

P: Passed (with minor amendments) a House bill clarifying the muddled immigration provisions of the McCarran law. The new measure permits entry of aliens who were members of totalitarian or Communist groups if they joined 1) as children, 2) because of law, or 3) to obtain jobs or food. One effect of the new law: 250 ex-Falangist Basque sheepherders, sponsored by Nevada's Pat McCarran, will be permitted to enter the U.S.

The House:

P: Received from Carl Vinson's Armed Services Committee a draft bill containing one notable improvement over the companion Senate measure: it erased any ceiling on the size of the armed services (the Senate's ceiling: 4,000,000). But with a political eye trained on U.S. mothers, the committee also set the draft age at 18 1/2 (the Senate's limit: 18); with another political eye on the South, gave draftees the right to ask to be put in segregated units; with eyes whirling in every direction, approved the principle of U.M.T., but in such a way that that measure would have to get congressional approval all over again before it actually went into effect.

P:Gave a backhanded endorsement to President Truman's plan for straightening out the mess in RFC by failing to reject his proposal to abolish RFC's five-man board of directors,* and appoint a single head--a change he could make under the Reorganization Act, unless Congress vetoed the plan by a constitutional majority.

P:Passed and sent to the White House a bill extending the federal rent-control program until June 30.

* RFC Director Walter E. Cosgriff, Republican, agreed this week that he and the other four directors should all get out "to restore public confidence and employee morale."

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