Marching Toward Election

Before Congress packed up to go home last week, the Senate and House overrode their second Eisenhower veto (out of 169)--a bill providing a $764 million pay raise for 1,500,000 federal employees.

The President had sent the bill back to Capitol Hill with an angry note that it was "indefensible by any light," and that Congress had yielded to "intensive and unconcealed political pressure." While blue-uniformed members of the nation's most effective lobby, the U.S. postal workers, packed the galleries, the House whooped past the veto, 346 to 69, with 89 (out of 145) Republicans deserting the President. The Senate concurred 74 (including 18 Republicans) to 24.

Also in Congress last week:

P: House Republicans and Southern Democrats, by a vote of 211 to 203, substituted a trimmed-down minimum wage bill for a more ambitious measure pushed by the liberal-controlled Labor Committee.

Workers now covered would win a new hourly minimum of $1.15, instead of the $1.25 asked by the committee and the Administration. Some 1,400,000 newly covered workers, mostly in retail services, are guaranteed a $1 wage floor (the present minimum), but are excluded from time-and-one-half overtime provisions. The bill may run into trouble in the Senate, where a broad-based (3,500,000 new workers). $1.25 minimum wage bill, backed by labor, has the right of way.

P: Approved by both houses and sent to the President was a $40 billion defense appropriation, $661 million above Eisenhower's budget request for fiscal 1961. The compromise bill kept intact the Senate's broad program of space and missile buildup, cut 3% across the board from Pentagon procurement, at House insistence, for a $400 million saving.

P: After two years of dirt sifting by the Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight, the House passed a bill tightening broadcasting regulations and outlawing payola (maximum penalty: $10,000 fine and a year in jail). The Federal Communications Commission would monitor TV programs for hints of payola or other abuses, slap a ten-day suspension or fine of up to $1,000-a-day on offending stations.

P: The House and Senate authorized the U.S. to be a co-founder (with 16 other free world nations) of the International Development Association, which will make longterm, low-interest loans to underdeveloped countries. Approved was a U.S. contribution of $320 million toward IDA's eventual $1 billion loan fund.

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