The Mess on the Hill

The postscript session of Congress degenerated, on the Senate side, into a sorry carnival of petty partisan squabbling. In the House, Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas had passed the word that no important business would be transacted during the first week, so not enough Congressmen showed up in Washington to make a quorum. This would have been all right if nobody had called attention to it. but the first morning, Iowa's cross-grained Republican H. R. Gross stood up and querulously demanded a quorum call. That was the end of the House's day. For the rest of the week. Gross kept the quorumless House in a legislative limbo.

Outburst of Wrangling. About the only person in Washington who seemed to be enjoying the mess on Capitol Hill was Dwight Eisenhower. The session had been designed by Democrats to make themselves look good, passing bills that would help them politically even if Ike vetoed them. But now Ike, in his newly awakened partisan spirit, was demanding that Congress enact 21 recommendations he had put forward. He even held a press conference for the second week in a row. "I don't see any reason why there shouldn't be some action." he told it, since "Congress passed in two weeks last year 436 bills."*

Richard Nixon, eager to hit the campaign trail, found the short session a nuisance ; Jack Kennedy found it a calamity. Kennedy staffers grumbled that Lyndon Johnson had ordered up the session to promote his own vain presidential bid. Muttered one Kennedy man: "This is Lyndon's session, not ours."

While Kennedy burned, the Senate fiddled. Ohio Democrat Stephen Young triumphantly proclaimed that he had clocked Vice President Nixon's presence in his presiding officer's chair the previous week: only 2 hours 55 minutes 40 seconds. That touched off a fresh outburst of partisan wrangling, this time about Jack Kennedy's spotty Senate attendance record. Sneered Arizona's Barry Goidwater at one point: "Where is the distinguished Senator from Massachusetts? I do not know. He might be on his yacht." Warned Connecticut Democrat Thomas Dodd, in the Senate's most undeniably accurate statement of the week: "The guests in the galleries must get a very poor impression of the greatest deliberative body in the world."

Cliffhanging Vote. Midweek came before Jack Kennedy could bring to a vote his "must" bill to lift the federal mini mum wage from $1 to $1.25 (see box). Delay had given opponents extra time to arm themselves, and amendments came hurtling at Kennedy from both sides of the aisle. Florida Democrat Spessard Holland wanted to strike out coverage of retail workers (beaten 56 to 39). Minority Leader Everett McKinley Dirksen put up an Administration-favored proposal to set the minimum wage at $1.15 instead of $1.25, and expand coverage to include only 2,000,000 additional workers instead of the Kennedy bill's 5,000,000 (beaten 54 to 39). The most formidable threat came from a fellow middle-road Democrat, Oklahoma's Mike Monroney, who wanted to restrict coverage to firms operating in two or more states. Counting noses, Jack Kennedy saw himself in danger of a humiliating defeat, and compromised. He was "prepared to accept some changes in other parts of the bill," he said, if the Monroney amendment was rejected. The amendment lost by a cliff-hanging 50 to 48 (near the tail end of the roll call, Vermont Republican Winston Prouty altered his intended yea to a nay to save Dick Nixon from the embarrassment of having to break a tie).

Kennedy agreed to give up guaranteeing workers in hotels, motels and restaurants the new minimum. There upon the bill finally passed, 62 to 34.

Republicans were winning no prizes for statesmanship, but Democrats privately feared that they themselves were losing more by the session. The public, the argument ran, is mindful of the two-thirds Democratic majorities in both houses, tends to blame the Democrats for congressional misbehavior and for bills unpassed. Growled Montana's Mike Mansfield, the Democratic whip: "The sooner we get out of here, the better it will be for the Democrats."

* Most of the 436 bills were minor items of the private-relief sort that slide into law without a word of floor debate.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.