Congress' Week

The desks of Congress were already piled high with urgent and important legislation. Then President Truman added his foreign-policy message to the stack. At first, Congressmen were rocked on their heels by the historic responsibility thrust at them. When the shock wore off, they looked at their calendars to see how they could meet the March 31 deadline for aid to Greece and Turkey.

The look was depressing. The two houses had yet to agree on a budget ceiling, and their conferees had not even met. The Senate was logjammed. Portal pay, atomic-energy nominations, sugar rationing and aid for displaced persons were all ahead of the Greek-Turkish question, and yet the leadership wanted action on this within two weeks.

Such rip-roaring speed was clearly impossible, as the Senate demonstrated last week. It took two days and most of a night session to debate a proposed constitutional amendment to bar a presidential third term. Then the G.O.P. leadership frittered away the rest of its first night session discussing not issues, but agenda, barely squeezing in a vote (59-to-23) to pass the third-term ban.

No Real Saving. Meanwhile the House, under tighter and more efficient discipline, passed the season's first appropriation bill, to keep the Treasury and Post Office running another year. It was a whopper--the President had asked $13.3 billion, or more than one-third of the entire budget--and most of it could not be cut (e.g., $5 billion for interest on the national debt was untouchable). The Republicans, bent on economy, could squeeze only $94 million from the operating funds, which would be no more than a dribble in the bucket of $6 billion promised savings. But they left out $800 million for refunds on overpaid income taxes. Democrats cried "phony," pointed out that the money would have to be paid anyway.

The fact was that all talk of budget ceilings and tax cuts had been made unrealistic by the new foreign-policy line. Said New Hampshire's Styles Bridges, chairman of the Senate Appropriations

Committee: "It knocks budget plans askew." He thought the whole, interrelated problem would have to be tackled anew. Many thoughtful Republicans agreed with him--but not Minnesota's Harold Knutson, chairman of Ways & Means, who was driving his committee with a bull whip.

Knutson was back at his old isolationist stand. He snorted: "Maybe ... we are able to help the world because we are taking everything away from our own people and giving it to someone else." No matter what U.S. foreign commitments might be, he was determined to get a 20% cut in income taxes, arguing: "If we don't get it now, we never will."

His bullheadedness began to embarrass his G.O.P. colleagues. At week's end the House leadership was ready to call a caucus to thrash out the tax question and avoid an open, intraparty fight.

Ceiling of Zeros. With their heads in a spiral nebula of billions, Congressmen were treated to a floor show which brought the question of budgets down to its simplest terms. Into the House chamber walked California's Helen Gahagan Douglas with a shopping basket which she toted right up to the microphone. She had used the same shopping list last June, when the items in the basket totaled $10. Now, in a horrifying crescendo, she rattled off the post-OPA increases: butter, from 65-c- to 82-c-; eggs, 53-c- to 69-c-; two pounds of pork chops ("the poor man's meat"), 76-c- to $1.46. The new total: $15.02.

Cried the decorative Democrat: "The average . . . family has its budget bursting to the seams." The U.S. and the average U.S. family were in the same fix.

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