New Session, Old Scene

To re-enter a closed house; to stumble over a chair lying on the floor where it was overturned in the haste of departure; to discover the morning paper lying as usual on the sideboard where it was left four months earlier; to find a forgotten quarter-pound of butter in the icebox-- such will be the experience of the 74th Congress as it meets this week. This will be no new Congress but merely a second assembly of an old one picking up where it left off Aug. 26. The bills then in committee pigeonholes will be found in the same pigeonholes. The status of legislation on the calendar will not have altered by so much as a comma. The old officers of both Houses will resume their duties without reelection. The same committees will automatically begin to function where they left off. And the same faces will appear on the floor.

Well Leader, A sprinkling of new faces will also be there. In the House will appear Representative Verner Wright Main of Michigan, whose election as an advocate of the Townsend Plan lately stirred politicians (TIME, Dec. 30). The Senate will have a new Farmer-Laborite in the person of Elmer A. Benson, appointed by Minnesota's Governor Olson to succeed the late Senator Schall (see col. 1). But in many ways the most interesting new face in the 74th Congress will be that of Alabama's Representative William Brockman ("Tallulah's Father") Bankhead, who has sat in the House for 18 years. A year ago. on the day before Congress met, he was chosen Floor Leader of one of the biggest Democratic majorities in House history (TIME, Jan. 14). Same day he went to the hospital with one of his repeated attacks of acute indigestion followed by a heart attack. So poor was his health that all last winter, spring and summer he was unable to assume his House duties, and the New Deal had to get along as best it could without a floor leader. Part of those duties were assumed by goodhearted Speaker Byrns, part by aged Representative Edward Thomas Taylor of Colorado, part by un- popular Chairman John J. O'Connor of the Rules Committee. But of able leadership there was little.

Last week Leader Bankhead was back at his Capitol office, promising that this year the New Deal should not go leaderless in the House. Already Washington was filling up with the bigwigs of Congress. Democrats from Speaker Byrns to Senator Harrison were singing the same old tune: a short and peaceful session adjourning in May. If that was to happen it would require much good work on Leader Bankhead's part, and he himself had no illusions. Said he: "I look for a snappy session but not necessarily a short one."

He well knew that the session before a national election is a prime opportunity for the Outs to bedevil the Ins. He may have remembered in June 1932, before adjournment, he himself was standing on the floor of the House broadcasting in the Congressional Record an attack on the keynoter of the Republican National Convention which met in Chicago to renominate Herbert Hoover. This year Republicans would like the same opportunity. Nearly three years ago, when the New Deal was new and unopposed, Representative Bankhead was already suffering attacks of acute indigestion in the cloakrooms. Now again, though the President, the Speaker and Senate leaders may sing sweetly of early adjournment, there are already signs of indigestion in the cloakrooms of Congress. Program, Only three real jobs for Congress had last week been outlined by the President:

1) Regular appropriation bills for the various departments have to be passed. This routine job is fairly well in hand, the House Appropriations Committee having finished work on the Independent Offices, and the Treasury & Post Office supply measures.

2) The temporary Neutrality Act expires on Feb. 29 and a permanent act must be passed. There is little or no Washington agreement on the terms of such long-range legislation. The temper of returning Congressmen was last week decidedly in favor of fixing by law what the U. S. should do in case of a war abroad, namely to forbid export of arms and materials to all warring nations alike. The State Department felt acutely that executive discretion will be necessary lest the U. S. by indiscriminate embargoes put weaker nations at such a disadvantage that international bullies should be encouraged to attack them. Fear of Congress that flexible neutrality would give the State Department a handle to draw the U. S. into war was firmly set against the State Department's fear that an inflexible act would provoke wars in which the U. S. might be involved. Such a deadlock promised to inflame the peace passions of the U. S. Last week the National Peace Conference, a confederation of 30 peace propaganda societies, helpfully offered a draft for a new Neutrality Act. It would give the President not only orders to embargo exports of arms but also optional authority to embargo exports of all materials essential to war. More important, it would give the President power to lift embargoes in favor of nations which are the victims of aggression, provided a) that the majority of the nonbelligerent nations signing the Pact of Paris agreed who was the aggressor and, b) that Congress approved.

The fighting spirit of peace lovers is in for still more rousing during the coming session. The Senate Munitions Investigation Committee planned to reopen hearings, summon J. P. Morgan & friends, try to prove that the bankers drove the U. S. into the last war, try to dig up enough headline scandals to win committee members headline credit with headline-reading voters.

3) Some new relief bill must be passed, something to succeed WPA and FERA. What the President might propose or whether he might simply let Congress decide, no one knew last week. Last spring Congress spent about two months squabbling over relief. Next spring, an election ahead, Congress may squabble just as long and just as bitterly on the same subject.

Disruptions. More issues will doubtless be battled over than the President can today possibly anticipate. The Bonus, with a preferred place on the House calendar, may be the least of these, for its advocates are preparing to compromise on anything that will pass out money in plentiful quantities to make contented voters before election.

The real disruptions will come in regard to measures that Franklin Roosevelt must set his hand against. Among eminent possibilities: the Townsend Plan; the Frazier-Lemke bill for paying off farm mortgages with $3,000,000 in greenbacks; attempts to alter or repeal the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act.

Imponderables. Over & above the legislative mischances which may rise from the President's program and the disruptions within Congress, are two great unknowns. One is the actions of the Supreme Court. With decisions on AAA and the Bankhead Cotton Control Act close at hand, with decisions on the Guffey Coal Act. the Public Utility Act, the Labor Disputes Act in the offing, the possibility of one or more New Deal upsets means that at any time Congress may turn to tackle new legislative problems.

Second and more important imponderable is Franklin Roosevelt who, as all Washington knows, has an impulsive habit of thinking up things for Congress to do at the last minute. Last year he tossed a new tax bill without warning into the Capitol on the eve of adjournment, precipitated late-summer anguish for all concerned. Now, intent, as he has announced, on a short session of Congress, he has made up his mind to a short legislative program. But at any time he may decide that the U. S. wants a new act to promote low-cost housing, amendments to the Social Security Act, a navy-building program, ship subsidies or new measures to reduce interest rates.

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