Paying the Store

Arkansas' Wilbur Mills is not the kind of Congressman to make the same mistake twice. Earlier this month, when the House of Representatives dealt its Ways and Means Committee chairman--and the Johnson Administration--a humil iating defeat by voting down a routine bill to raise the Federal debt limit, Mills determined to make his own nose count rather than rely on the arithmetic of White House lobbyists. "I'm not moving," Mills vowed to a friend, "until I've got the votes." Last week Mills moved, winning passage of a slightly amended version of the original measure by the ready, mistake-proof margin of 217 votes to 196.

The bill, which is likely to be accepted by the Senate, raises the maximum debt to $358 billion--$22 billion above the present figure--and effective July 1, 1968, provides for a further "temporary" increase of $7 billion. The original proposal, for a one-step increase this year to the same total of $365 billion, was opposed by House Republicans in a gambit to make headlines with their economy-in-Government line, and they carried along enough Democrats to win. In the second round, Mills and the Administration prevailed by preaching party loyalty and simple economic sense to the Democratic defectors. After all, Administration spokesmen pointed out, the G.O.P.'s success in resisting a raise in the debt ceiling was hardly compatible with its inability to win substantive reductions in the programs that necessitated the raise. As Wilbur Mills sees it, those in the legislative branch of government who opposed increasing the national debt limit were in the position of the man who gives his wife a charge account at a store and then declines to pay her bills.

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