From Oaths to Goosefeathers

Still straining toward adjournment, the U.S. Congress last week:

>Restored, in the Senate, $533 million worth of House cuts in the Kennedy foreign aid program. As sent to a Senate-House conference committee, the Senate measure called for a total appropriation of $4,196,600,000. For President Kennedy, who had described military-economic aid as the most important piece of legislation to go before the current session, this represented a major triumph. Of the total Senate appropriation, $1.7 billion would go for direct military assistance to uncommitted as well as Allied nations, $1.2 billion for long-term development loans, $450 million for supporting assistance to back direct military aid, $334 million for development grants to newly independent nations, $300 million for the President's contingency fund.

> Approved, with a House roll-call vote of 287 to 97, a bill placing the Peace Corps on a permanent basis and authorizing an appropriation of $40 million for this fiscal year. Conservatives of both parties held out for, and got, a loyalty section requiring every Peace Corps volunteer to file an affidavit that he neither believes in overthrow of the United States Government nor knowingly belongs to an organization advocating such action.

> Extended, in the Senate, impacted-areas school aid and the National Defense Education Act for another two years. The impacted-areas bill, which benefits 3.800 school districts in the home districts of 319 House members, had been used by congressional leaders to lure reluctant Congressmen into supporting what they didn't want (national aid to education) in order to get what they did want (federal school aid for their home districts). For example, Mississippi's Democratic Representative William Colmer, who helped block the national bills in the House Rules Committee, turned around and voted for the impacted-areas bill, under which he will get $1,245,000 for school construction, maintenance and operation in his district. The two-year bill will diminish incentive for any general aid bill proposed next year.

> Toyed with the semantics of President Kennedy's proposed Disarmament Agency, up for consideration at a time when popular sentiment is more belliferous than pacific, changed the name, in the House Foreign Affairs Committee, to the United States Arms Control Agency. The stuffier Senate had already chosen a somewhat longer hapax legomenon, the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency for World Peace and Security.

>Turned down, in the House Appropriations Committee, a $4,000,000 request by President Kennedy to help jack up the entire Temple of Abu Simbel 203 feet above the rising waters of the Nile's Aswan High Dam in Egypt.

> Shot a special emergency bill to the President authorizing the General Services Administration to sell 2,000,000 Ibs. of goosefeathers and down (used in sleeping bags, flight jackets, survival suits), which it has been hoarding since 1947 (along with iodine, opium, castor oil, sperm oil, diamonds, sapphires, rubies, instruments, missiles, aluminum, tin, zinc, lead, nickel, bismuth and platinum). When Delaware's Senator John Williams asked how many feathers the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization had collected, he was told that the information was classified.

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