The Prelude of the 83rd

As the new U.S. Senate tuned up last week, the old wit on the rostrum seemed to be stealing the show. Alben Barkley swore in the new and re-elected members with chuckles and flourishes, and cautioned one & all: "Be sure and sign the payroll." When the only woman Senator, Maine's Republican Margaret Chase Smith, appeared with her new colleague, former Governor Frederick G. Payne, Alben Barkley sweepingly kissed her hand as the galleries cheered. The old (75) Veep was having a fine time.

Man in a Cutaway. It was soon apparent, however, that retiring Vice President Barkley was not really running anything. The man in charge was the tall Senator in the black cutaway standing front & center at the majority leader's desk. Ohio's Senator Robert Alphonso Taft had been elected majority leader unanimously at the Republican caucus. The only man who had once seamed a more likely prospect than Taft, New Hampshire's Styles Bridges, became president pro tempore, a mostly honorary post which he could claim by virtue of his top seniority (16 years) among Republican Senators. California's middle-of-the-road William Fife Knowland succeeded Taft as chairman of the Republican Policy Committee. When Massachusetts' Leverett Saltonstall indicated that he wanted to continue as assistant floor leader (whip), Taft got Michigan's Homer Ferguson to stop eying the post, and Saltonstall, an early Eisenhower supporter, stepped in as Taft's assistant.

Bob Taft quickly shut off the only threat of an opening-day battle. Nineteen Senators, including four Republicans, had joined in an attempt to adopt an effective anti-filibuster rule. But neither Taft nor any other G.O.P. leader wanted to open the Republican 83rd Congress with a fight. On Taft's motion, the argument was put off until this week, with little chance that the 19, whose chief aim is to prevent Southerners from filibustering civil rights legislation to death, will get anywhere.

Across the aisle from Bob Taft, the man the Democrats elected as minority leader sounded a notable note of harmony. Said Texas' Lyndon Baines Johnson, a middle-of-the-road Democrat who stuck with his party in the 1952 election: "It's not the duty of the opposition to oppose. It's a new Congress and a new era . . We ought to spend the next few months working for our country and our kids . . ."

This harmonious prelude of the 83rd by no means meant that it would always be thus. There was a live, brilliantly cravatted reminder of one big problem the Republican leadership faces. Playing to the galleries, as usual, Wayne Morse, the Oregon maverick, strolled into the chamber lugging an iron folding chair, prepared to "sit in the middle of the aisle." The Republicans shooed him over to his old seat in the front row on their side, just because that was the simplest thing to do. Not so simple would be the Morse-born problem of maintaining a Republican majority on all committees. With the Senate divided 48 Republicans, 47 Democrats and one Morse, the G.O.P. leadership would have to reshuffle committee sizes to prevent Morse from holding the balance of power on important groups.

Chief Carpenter. Across the way in the House of Representatives, the pattern was similar. Bald, old (71 this week) Sam Rayburn, who served longer as Speaker (3,760 days) than any man in history, had stepped down to minority leader with a characteristic line. Said he: "Time will tell, if they [the Republicans] can really run the Government. Any jackass can kick a barn door down, but it takes a carpenter to build it back." The Republicans' chief carpenter in the House, Massachusetts' Joe Martin, Speaker in the 80th Congress and Sam Rayburn's good friend, ran things with a firm gavel. Ready to help him as majority leader on the floor, as he had in the 80th Congress, was Indiana's Charles Halleck. When a comparatively small (58) group of representatives tried to strip the Rules Committee of its power to pigeonhole bills, Martin needed no help to bang through a voice vote shouting them down. It is the new leadership's responsibility, said the Speaker, to see that desirable legislation is not bottled up.

While Joe Martin demonstrated that he was in charge on his side of the rotunda just as Bob Taft was on the other side, members of the House dropped more than 1,000 bills into the hopper. Among them: one from New York's Republican Representative Daniel Alden Reed, who will be chairman of the tax-writing Ways & Means Committee, to cut individual income taxes an average of 11% next June 30. Speaker Martin gave it a possibly significant designation: H.R. No. 1.

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