New Mood, Hard Road

The passage of President Kennedy's sprawling housing bill (see box next page) may well have been the Administration's last major victory in the 87th Congress, first session.

In his first few months in office, the President did pretty well on Capitol Hill: he got through his proposals for a minimum wage increase, aid to depressed areas, and the creation of 73 new federal judgeships. But in recent weeks his foreign policy failures have taught Congressmen that the President is far from infallible--and that they can vote against him without incurring too much wrath from the folks back home. Last week 18 Democratic Senators joined Republicans in voting 52 to 38 against an Administration proposal to clear the backlog of cases before the Securities and Exchange Commission by giving Chairman William Lucius Gary and the other commissioners the right to delegate decision-making authority on minor cases to staff members. Just a week before, the House had casually brushed aside, by a 323-to-77 vote, a New Frontier bill to increase the authority of Federal Communications Commission Chairman Newton Minow. And in the new mood of the Congress, the worst was yet to come for the Kennedy Administration. Items:

AID TO EDUCATION. The Senate passed the Administration's $2.5 billion bill to build public school classrooms and help pay public school teachers' salaries last May. At that time, it appeared that the House would also approve the measure. As of last week, the aid-to-education bill seemed all but certain to die in the House. The man who had done the most to ruin the bill's chances was none other than House Majority Leader John McCormack, like the President a Roman Catholic from Massachusetts. McCormack favors, as a necessary counterpart to the public school bill, amendments to the National Education Defense Act that would permit federal loans to be made to Catholic and private schools for classroom construction. As of last week, he had persuaded two Catholic and Democratic members of the House Rules Committee to vote against clearing the public school bill until the committee also cleared the parochial school measure. When and if the public school bill does get out of Rules, McCormack's tactics will probably have infuriated enough Congressmen to ensure the bill's defeat.

FOREIGN AID. Kennedy asked for a $4.8 billion program this coming fiscal year: $2.9 billion for economic aid, $1.9 billion for military aid. He also urged, and strongly, the right to set up a five-year plan financed by $1.5 billion taken from the repayments of old foreign loans plus $7.3 billion borrowed from the Treasury. Both the Senate and the House are almost certain to turn down Kennedy's five-year plan, which the Administration considers the heart of the program.

FARM AID. The key measure of Kennedy's overall farm bill would allow farmers and the Department of Agriculture to work out schemes for each commodity--acreage control, price supports or whatever. Congress would then have the right to kill or approve the plans, but would have no power to rewrite them. Facing certain defeat on this point, the Administration has belatedly offered a compromise proposal to allow Congress to rewrite the programs as it sees fit. But the bill is still in deep trouble.

MEDICAL CARE FOR THE AGED. Kennedy's measure to use the social security system to finance some forms of medical care for persons 65 years and over (full payment for 180 days in a nursing home) might get by the Senate, but in its present form it is doomed in the House Ways & Means Committee by at least 15-10.

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