An Unsettling Finale in Congress

SLUGGISH, vacillating and quarrelsome throughout its two years of life, the 91st Congress could not even muster the means to die gracefully. It did not so much expire as commit suicide, victim of its ineffectual procedures, disagreement over priorities and inter-chamber acrimonies.

Most of the blame for the closing debacle fell upon the Senate, which had diddled and dawdled too long over too many issues. In a rare public display of bitterness, members of the House, which had discharged its duties much more expeditiously, openly assailed the Senate. "I am fed up with the procrastination, the indecision, the inability to get the job done on the other side of the Capitol," House Republican Leader Gerald Ford told his colleagues. Missouri Republican Durward Hall used harsher words: "The American people have been set upon, as was Caesar of ancient Rome, by supposedly friendly Senators."

Gordian Knot. The net effect of most of the senatorial intransigence was to defer final decisions on many issues. The buck-passing means that some battles will have to be fought again. Thus the Senate refused to give the President his Family Assistance Plan, new restrictions on imports of foreign goods or funds for continued development of the supersonic transport aircraft. Even a much-needed increase in Social Security benefits to help senior citizens keep up with the cost of living became a casualty of the deadline pressures.

The setbacks to Administration programs occurred mainly because most of the issues had become intertwined in a Gordian knot of the Senate's devising. The welfare reform, trade quotas and Social Security increase had all been meshed into a single bill by the Senate Finance Committee. Its chairman, Louisiana Democrat Russell Long, finally moved last week to strip the bill of all except the Social Security provisions--against the will of leaders of both parties. The Administration wanted all three programs and figured that Social Security was must legislation that would piggyback the other two into law. Democratic leaders, opposed to the trade quotas but willing to accept welfare reform, still hoped to work out a deal with the White House: if the President would forget about trade, they would push welfare. There was no response from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Exhausted by the impasse, the Senators accepted Long's package-splitting motion, 49 to 21.

The move allowed the Senate to pass the Social Security bill for the moment, while trade and welfare died in limbo. The Administration could now charge that the Democratic-controlled Congress had killed welfare reform, and there was no doubt that it would. Said one White House legislative aide: "We'd just as soon have the issue as the bill. We're going to go up and down the country showing who killed the bill."

Even the Social Security increase died, however, when Arkansas Democrat Wilbur Mills, Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, protested that there simply was not time to resolve "100 major differences" between provisions of the House and Senate bills in a conference committee. Actually, Mills had his own special motive, again tied to welfare reform. He intends to push through his own version of a family assistance plan in the next Congress, but calculates that he needs the Social Security increase as the sweetener to get the reform. His target is to pass a bill "by Lincoln's birthday" that would include a Social Security increase retroactive to Jan. 1 so that the delay would not hurt recipients. Vowed Mills about the Senators and his own welfare reform: "They're going to eat that bill."

The SST issue similarly will carry over, since a Senate filibuster against the aircraft led by Wisconsin Democrat William Proxmire proved effective in blocking a definitive decision to continue desired by Washington's Boeing-conscious Democrat Henry Jackson and other SST supporters. Overriding the objections of South Dakota Democrat George McGovern and other liberals, the Senate grudgingly accepted a House-passed food-stamp bill that disqualifies a family from the benefits if it includes an able-bodied adult who refuses to accept work.

Failure to Perform. The dominant quality of the 91st Congress thus was its negativism, which can, of course, be a valuable legislative contribution. The

Senate's finest hours may have been in its rejections of the Haynsworth and Carswell nominations to the Supreme Court, not as the President claimed, because they were Southerners, but because they fell short of the court's high standards. The Senate also demonstrated a healthy skepticism about military budgets, new defense systems and the President's conduct of foreign policy.

More positively, the Congress extended voting rights in national elections to 18-year-olds, instituted a lottery system for the draft, passed a comprehensive reform of the Post Office and launched programs to provide better rail passenger service, check air pollution from automobiles and combat water pollution. It gave the Federal Government new powers to enforce safety standards in industry and in coal mines. But it also demonstrated, all too dramatically, just how badly its own procedures need to be modernized.

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