Farewells & Fumbling Blocks

At 4:11 a.m. Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson moved for adjournment; Vice President Nixon, presiding, brought down his gavel--and the jangling of the Senate call bells noisily marked the end of the 85th Congress. But before the bells clanged, there had been the usual maddening, last-minute fumbling blocks. Nevada's neolithic "Molly" Malone numbed Senate floor and galleries with a wandering diatribe against foreign aid that included lengthy quotations from George Washington, Karl Marx, Andrew Jackson and Molly Malone ("The Nevada air corps can lick any European nation"). While an early-finishing House sang Home on the Range, Wisconsin's freshman Democrat William Proxmire infuriated his Senate colleagues by plopping a 750-page report on his desk and earnestly threatening to filibuster, as Saturday midnight approached, against any thought of diverting Lake Michigan water to the Chicago sewer system.

Finally, thankfully. Congress reached the last major order of business. Sent to the White House after closing night: a keystone bill providing $3,298,092,500 for foreign aid and mutual security. The final total was $220 million more than the House wanted, $220 million less than the Senate had previously voted, and $652 million below the total that President Eisenhower originally requested.

In other adjournment-week congressional action:

> The House, which approved a $10 billion permanent increase in the $275 billion permanent national debt limit, plus an additional temporary increase of $3 billion, changed its mind. It went along with a Senate bill pressed by Virginia's penny-counting Harry Byrd, setting the permanent increase at $8 billion and the temporary increase at $5 billion more until next June 30.

> Senate and House conferees on the federal-aid-to-education bill scratched a Senate provision for 23,000 federal scholarships, agreed on remaining features of an $887-million bill to improve U.S. scientific training (see EDUCATION).

> The House sent to the White House a social security bill that raises the benefits for 12 million people by 7%. Included in the bill: tax increases for 75 million workers so as to put social security on a pay-as-you-go basis.

> The Senate finally approved the appointment of W. Wilson White, 52, as Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Justice Department's new civil rights division. White's confirmation had been stalled since February by Southerners, infuriated because White fixed the legal basis on which President Eisenhower sent troops into Little Rock.

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