Upping the Ante

Out of nowhere flashed the rumor, sweeping across Capitol Hill, lighting up switchboards, sending Democratic congressional aides running helter-skelter to newsmen with the breathless question: "Anything from the White House yet?"

The rumor: the Eisenhower Administration was about to send a tax-cutting bill to Congress.

House Ways & Means Committee Chairman Wilbur Mills, ordinarily a calm, slow-going Arkansan, got the word during hearings on reciprocal trade, rushed from the room, set up a telephone command post in a nearby office, alerted Speaker Sam Rayburn, huddled with other Democratic leaders, issued urgent orders for committee staffers to whip up a Democratic tax-cut bill the moment the White House moved. No matter what chips the Republican Administration threw onto the table against recession, the Democratic

Congress was determined to up the ante in the wildest political game so far in Election Year 1958.

Highballing Series. As it turned out last week, the tax-cut rumor was phony. But the excitement it caused was as real as anything that happened on Capitol Hill, where Democrats and Republicans fought for control of the economic issue, which might make the critical November difference in from 60 to 80 House seats and a dozen or so Senate places.

There were a few hysterical Democratic outbursts. House Majority Leader John McCormack cried: "This recession was deliberately planned and put into operation by the Republican Administration." But the general Democratic strategy had been coldly planned and was coldly executed by Senate Leader Lyndon Johnson and "Mister Sam" Rayburn. Its essentials: 1) let the Eisenhower Administration move first on tax cuts; the longer Ike waits, figure Democrats, the more laggard his party will appear; then 2) bump all Republican bets with a whopping Democratic tax slash aimed mostly at relief for middle-and lower-income workers, i.e., most U.S. voters. Meanwhile, the Democratic Express could roar down the tracks with a highballing series of antirecession spending bills--and Republicans could grab onto the caboose as best they could. Items: P: The Senate shouted through a Lyndon Johnson resolution calling upon the Administration to speed public-works spending on previously authorized projects. The vote: 93 (including 46 Republicans) to 1 (New Hampshire Republican Norris Cotton). Actually, the Administration's public-works speedup was under way without the help of the Johnson resolution. P: The Senate passed a $1.8 billion housing bill, 86 to 0, with 44 Republicans supporting the measure authored by Alabama Democrat John Sparkman. At one point Democratic politics came through loud and clear, when the Democrats tried to knock out a provision permitting an increase of interest rates on G.I. loans from 4 1/2% to 4 3/4%--an increase that will encourage private lenders to handle the now-shunned G.I. loans. The increase was permitted to stand only because Vice President Nixon threw his vote to the Republican side to break a 47-47 tie. P: With the help of six Republican votes, the Senate Public Works Committee followed Tennessee's Democratic Senator Albert Gore in unanimously authorizing an additional $600 million speedup in road building this year. The Administration had called for a more modest increase that would not begin until next year. P: Eleven Republicans joined 39 Democrats as the Senate, by a 50-10-43 vote, adopted a resolution to freeze farm price supports and acreage allotments at not less than the 1957 levels. The vote was a defeat for the Administration and Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson, who wanted to cut farm giveaways. P: But when Illinois' Democratic Senator Paul Douglas tried to tack a $5 billion tax cut onto a routine insurance tax bill, thereby departing from his leadership's check-and-raise tax policy, he was clobbered, 71 to 14.

Nervous Kibitzers. The Democratic strategy was successful in upsetting nearly all Republican alignments. Some Old Guardsmen, e.g., New York's Representative Dan Reed, the ranking G.O.P. member of the Ways and Means Committee, and Pennsylvania's Ed Martin, chilly in the past toward the Eisenhower Administration, now found themselves backing Ike in his refusal to push the panic button. Yet many devoted Eisenhower Republicans found themselves nervously eyeing the Administration's play of the hand. Among them: New Jersey's Clifford Case, New York's Jack Javits, and Kentucky's John Sherman Cooper, who are in the forefront of Senators calling on the Administration for more dramatic moves against unemployment. Even the Eisenhower Cabinet itself seemed split, in point of tax-cut timing if not of principle (see Republicans)--and in the general Republican confusion, the Democrats could only go on raking in all the antirecession chips.

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