Unearned Holiday

The members of the House were frank about their intentions; they wanted an Easter holiday. So they airily waved aside their unfinished work, voted themselves an eleven-day holiday until April 2, and happily dispersed.

The Senate, also vacation-bent, tried to be a little less obvious. First, Minority Leader Kenneth Wherry solemnly vowed that it would take most of another week for his various Republican colleagues to deliver themselves of their last words in the Great Debate.

Wherry, therefore, could not give his consent to a vote on the troops-to-Europe resolution for some time--certainly not before April 2. In other words, even if the Senate stayed in session, it could get no bills passed.

Massachusetts' Republican Henry Cabot Lodge, fed up with the dillydallying of the Midwest isolationists in his own party, protested: "It is no time for a group of serious and responsible men such as we are to be talking about a long ten-day Easter vacation." Wherry piously retorted: no one is talking about a vacation. But, as Florida's Democrat Spessard Holland pointed out, the only members who needed to be in the chamber were those who were going to make speeches on the subject before the Senate. Nobody expected any new ideas from them, nobody expected any votes to be changed. So off home for an undeclared holiday went about 60 Senators, leaving a handful of Republicans in Washington to talk into the record the last unneeded words of the moribund Great Debate.

With Embroidery Scissors. Neither legislative wing could claim that it had done much to earn the holiday. True, in 38 days the Senate had passed 163 measures; in 33 days the House had passed 104 measures. But many of them were of minor import, to say the most, e.g., authorization for the Marine Corps Band to give a concert at South Boston, Mass., designation of 1951 as Audubon Centennial Year. Only a few major bills, such as extension of rent control, a $2.7 billion appropriation for navy shipbuilding, had been passed and sent to the White House.

The House was about three weeks behind the usual schedule in its appropriation bills. Members talked grandly about pruning appropriations, but they did their pruning with embroidery scissors. Just before it sped away on its recess, the House managed to snip-snip .09% off $2.9 billion funds for Treasury and Post Office. No work at all had been done on the mammoth armed services bill; after all the brave talk about higher income and corporate taxes, there was no chance of a tax bill before late summer or fall. A good deal of the legislative structure of the industrial mobilization program will expire in June; nothing has been done about writing new measures.

Without Leaders. Who was to blame for the Congress' indifferent record at Easter time? Some of the responsibility rested with the Administration, whose requests to Congress had been sweeping and vast--and unspecific. The White House, dallying and fumbling, had supplied little guidance. On Capitol Hill itself there was a woeful lack of leadership. Majority Leader Ernest McFarland, though patient and well-liked, had failed to hold the Senate's nose to the grindstone. Tom Connally, usually impatient and arrogant, could think of nothing better to do in the field of foreign policy than let the opposition talk itself out.

On the opposite side, many of his own Republican colleagues disliked Minority Leader Wherry's tactics. Robert Taft was trying to wear a general's hat which did not fit him. Arthur Vandenberg, who might have taken command and ended the long-winded mumbling of the Great Debate, was home and desperately ill in Grand Rapids.

The best that could be said of the 82nd Congress was that in its first session it was no worse than the average new Congress; unfortunately it had made its record in mediocrity when the times called for something better than average.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.