The Christmas Tree Bill

For 18 days U.S. Senators had wrangled about the farm bill, introducing more than a hundred amendments, rejecting 31 and adopting 21. At the end of last week, with some 60 amendments to go, New Mexico's Democratic Senator Clinton P. Anderson looked at the result and said: "This bill gets more and more like a Christmas tree; there's something on it for nearly everyone."

After standing by the Eisenhower Administration's flexible price support system earlier (TIME, March 19), the Senate adopted a two-price system for wheat, permitting the Secretary of Agriculture to support at 100% of parity wheat grown for domestic food, while the rest of the crop (for livestock and for export) is supported at lower levels, or seeks its own price on the open market. By a margin of one vote it revived a two-parity formula that will raise support levels for corn, wheat, cotton and peanuts. The one-vote margin for the two-headed system came from West Virginia's new Democratic Senator William R. Laird III (see below), who had been sworn in just an hour before the roll call, and was casting his first vote.

While the Senate plowed along on the farm bill, there was some work done on other legislation:

P: The House voted 366-4 to extend key excise taxes (liquor, cigarettes, gasoline, automobiles) and corporate income taxes at their present rate for another year, as requested by the Administration.

P: The Senate voted to buy 7,000 acres of Indian reservation land for the Yellowtail Dam in the Bighorn River reclamation power project from the Crow Indian Tribe for $5,000,000. although the Federal Bureau of Reclamation had estimated that the land's actual market value is only $36,000.

P: The House Appropriations Committee rejected a proposal for federal aid in building an auditorium-civic center in Washington after Ohio's Democratic Representative Mike Kirwan, a former coal miner and railroader, objected to the proponents' argument that Washington needs a stage that can accommodate ballet. Said Kirwan: "You have to chloroform the people to get 500 to look at a ballet. Don't let anybody kid you on that score. It takes a lot of good courage to sit and watch somebody go into a toe dance. I am like Oliver Wendell Holmes. He said, 'Give me burlesque.' "

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