THE DO-LITTLE 85th CONGRESS

"What in the world is it?" asked John Dolittle, gazing at the strange creature.

"Lord save us!" cried the duck. "How does it make up its mind?"

"It doesn't look to me as though it had any" said Jip, the dog.

"This, Doctor," said Chee-Chee, "is the Pushmi-Pullyu--the rarest animal of the African jungles, the only two-headed beast in the world!"

--THE STORY of DOCTOR DOLITTLE

DOLITTLE would have loved the do-little 85th Congress, First Session. Domestic necessity pushed the 85th, after much hemming and hawing, into passing the first U.S. civil rights bill since Reconstruction. International tension pulled it, after much doodling and dawdling, into approving President Eisenhower's Middle East doctrine. Beyond these two significant accomplishments, the 85th Congress was a true Pushmi-Pullyu: it had trouble making up its mind, leaped in opposite directions after its two heads, and ended up hardly anywhere.

The Pushmi-Pullyu 85th was a political creature in a political jungle. Its Democratic majority, realizing it had little to worry about from a Republican President prohibited by the Constitution from running again, used this year's session to prepare for Election Year 1958--and beyond that, 1960. The Eisenhower and Old Guard branches of the Republican Party were already fighting over the 1960 successorship. Even the individual leaders of the Senate--Texas Democrat Lyndon Johnson and California Republican William Knowland--were moving ahead with their own personal plans for the White House in '60. Against such strong political tides, Dwight Eisenhower could make little headway with his theory of the President as a congressional adviser, not a director.

Thus the 85th Congress was shaped almost entirely by partisan politics.

What it did

BUDGET CUTS: The 85th Congress went on a budget spree.

It began, ironically, when Republican Treasury Secretary George Humphrey made his famous observation last January that continued big budgets would lead to a hair-curling depression. President Eisenhower helped it along by inviting Congress to try cutting his budget. Senate Leader Johnson, undisputed mastermind of the 85th, accepted the Republican invitation and turned it into a Democratic party.

Almost without exception, Administration programs took a budgetary mauling. But Congress was not really of a firm economy mind: it did not hesitate to vote $1,000,000 for new Senate office furniture, or to provide for the House's new $60 million office building, or to lay out $858 million for pork-barrel projects, or to ante up a $317 million pay raise for 518,000 postal workers (without increasing postal rates to cover the cost).

The net result was a cut of about $5.5 billion from the Administration's $72 billion budget. But the cost of economy-at-any-price may have been high. In the year of the Russian ICBM. the 85th Congress lopped $2.4 billion from the $36.1 billion requested by the Defense Department, virtually scuttled the U.S. Information Agency (cutting its appropriations by $48 million to $96 million), passed a $3.4 billion foreign aid bill -- about $1 billion less than President Eisenhower had deemed necessary to the security of the free world.

THE MIDDLE EAST DOCTRINE: For two full months, while the Middle East burned, the 85th Congress nitpicked and gnat-plucked (cried Oregon's Democratic Senator Wayne Morse: "I am waiting for the opposition point of view to provide some answers before I proceed to rebuttal and surrebuttal and rebuttal of the surrebuttal") before granting President Eisenhower authority to 1) spend $200 million in the area for stability-making foreign aid, and 2) use U.S. armed forces to help protect any Middle Eastern nation requesting U.S. aid against Communist aggression. Finally passed in March, the Eisenhower Doctrine came in the nick of time: only a month later proCommunists in Jordan attempted a takeover, and the Eisenhower Doctrine helped bring vital allies, e.g., Saudi Arabia, to King Hussein.

CIVIL RIGHTS COMPROMISE: In its closing hours, after three months of debate, the 85th Congress passed a workable civil rights bill that will 1) establish a federal civil rights commission with subpoena powers, 2) set up a special civil rights division in the Justice Department, and 3) enable the Government to seek injunctions on behalf of persons whose voting rights are violated. A key compromise, accepted by both branches only last week, will permit federal judges to set sentences of up to 45 days and fines of up to $300 in criminal contempt cases arising from denial of the right to vote. Jury trials will be required for greater penalties. Despite its aura of compromise, the civil rights bill may well stand as the top achievement of the 85th Congress.

THE FBI BILL: Last June, in the case of Clinton Jencks, an official of the Red-led Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Union, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Government must turn directly over to the defense all pertinent FBI documents relating to the pre-trial statements of prosecution witnesses. Last week the Congress passed a bill designed to prevent the open-sesame inspection of the FBI files by criminals and Communists. The bill banned pre-trial disclosure of the files, provided that trial judges, after hearing the testimony of the prosecution witnesses, should screen the FBI documents and turn over to the defense only those relevant to the testimony. It represented a compromise between a stronger measure urged by the Administration and a softer one demanded by Democratic liberals, led by Pennsylvania's Senator Joseph Clark. Clark & Co. thereby risked a revival of the old soft-on-Communism charges against the Democratic Party.

What it did not

The battle of the budget showed Congress that it could defy President Eisenhower, despite his personal popularity, and get away with it. The session was marked by the deliberate undercutting of the Eisenhower program. Of the major and minor legislative recommendations sent to Congress by the Administration, only 15.8% were approved. The 85th Congress failed to pass a school construction bill to relieve the nation's critical classroom shortage, failed to provide for a turnover of Government in case of presidential disability, failed to appropriate funds for flood insurance, failed to approve statehood for Hawaii or Alaska, failed to follow Hoover Commission recommendations for budget-practice reform, failed to give federal aid to economically depressed areas, failed to revise lobby and campaign-spending laws. Time after time, the 85th Congress moved only halfheartedly when it moved at all. Example: it finally got around to correcting certain inequities in the McCarran-Walter immigration law, but its changes fell far short of those urged by the Administration and left some 25,000 freedom-fighting Hungarian refugees to the U.S. in a sort of legal limbo as "parolees."

Inside-out & roundabout

The political push and pull of the 85th Congress turned many an old alliance inside-out, spun many an old party position roundabout. Five years of the Eisenhower Administration had shattered the historic coalition between conservative Senate Southerners and Republicans.

The South realized early in the civil rights battle that it had no chance whatever to block passage. The entire strategy was to get a bill weak to the point of being meaningless--and it failed even in that. The final vote spelled an end to the era in which Southern domination was the governing fact of the U.S. Senate.

Equally important was the party turnabout on foreign policy. In the 85th Congress it was the Democrats, who have long made internationalism an article of faith, who stalled the Eisenhower Doctrine and gutted foreign aid. And it was the Republicans, long associated in the public mind with isolationism, who stood with the President in his fight for free-world security.

For such changes, which may be woven into the basic fabric of U.S. political life, the 85th Congress, First Session, may be remembered longer than for its Pushmi-Pullyu legislative record.

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