Congress' Week

Mr. President, will the Senator yield?" is the most frequently heard question on the Senate floor. Despite its familiarity, West Virginia's droning Chapman Revercomb faltered in mid-speech when he heard it one day last week. The polite parliamentary request came from a citizen in a rear gallery.

Connecticut's Senator Raymond Baldwin, who happened to be presiding, recognized the gallery immediately--with an order to clear it. But before Citizen Brooks Washburn, a well-heeled, 32-year-old Portland, Ore. war veteran, went down under the hammer locks of Capitol police, he addressed the chair again. "Mr. President," he yelled with muffled frenzy, "these men are bothering me."

What had bothered Washburn into coming to Washington was the feeling he had got from his local newspapers that something was wrong with Congress. He had come East to find out what it was, concluded that Congressmen "weren't doing a damn thing," and decided to stoke the coals.

Speed-Up. Despite Citizen Washburn's opinion, Congress had its busiest week to date. The House passed Harold Knutson's tax reduction bill, thus immeasurably speeding up a final determination of the tax question. It also shouted through a cut-rate Labor-Federal Security Appropriation bill, over attempts to scuttle the U.S. Conciliation Service, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the NLRB. The House joined the Senate in extending a modified Second War Powers Act until June 30, ending Selective Service, and appropriating $9,000,000 to help Mexico fight its foot-&-mouth disease epidemic.

The Senate, at the urgent demand of Iowa's Bourke B. Hickenlooper, finally took up the confirmation of David E. Lilienthal as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. The debate was stalled when Ohio's John Bricker, who is against confirmation, proposed a delaying action: have the FBI investigate the loyalty of the commissioners, and let the Atomic Energy Committee do a second screening of AEC's 706 employees.

The question of sugar controls started another row among Senators already smarting under thousands of whiplash letters from U.S. housewives. Upshot: the Senate voted to end all sugar controls Oct. 31.

Anti-Nature. But the floor show of the week (which Citizen Washburn apparently missed) featured Senate debate on a bill authorizing the District of Columbia Commissioners to institute daylight-saving time in Washington.

Although most District citizens liked daylight saving during the war and want it back, most Senators come from areas prejudiced against "fast time." Nevertheless, Rhode Island's J. Howard McGrath thought the Senate ought to do "what is good and desirable for the people of the District of Columbia."

Louisiana's roly-poly John Overton objected: a sudden time jag would cause him to miss his favorite radio commentator (Lowell Thomas), and foul up the delivery schedule of his milkman.

"Mr. President," said Overton, huskily, "it seems to me that we should pursue the course that the God of Nature has prescribed. ... But here come the members of the Senate Committee on the District of Columbia, and like Joshua of old, they want to bid the sun and the moon to stand still. ... If the bill passes ... I will be tempted to insert in the Washington newspapers an advertisement--'Lost, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, one golden hour, set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward offered--it is lost forever.'"

The bill passed, 56 to 17.

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