Washington Turnabout

The 78th Congress had yet to enact an important law--yet by last week it had reversed the whole legislative trend of the last ten years. For a decade Congress, at the Administration's prodding, has hounded economic royalists, corporations, public utilities. Now the 78th, turning squarely around, was hounding the Administration.

In a scant six weeks its pattern had been spread for the U.S. people to read in every page of the Congressional Record, in the angry, antibureaucracy bills that tumbled into full hoppers, in the killing off of Leon Henderson and Ed Flynn, in no less than 17 investigations of the Government, in the wrathful roar that followed directives, orders, Federal moves big & small.

Last week the gale broke in a whistling fury, beat around the doors of the White House, whipped in & out of WPB, OWI, OPA and many another Federal agency, chilled the neck of every power-wielding office holder. Prominent Democrats rode the crest of it, outdoing Republicans in bureau-baiting and defiance of Government-by-executive-edict.

> Out of the Ways and Means Committee Wesley E. Disney, Oklahoma's grey, square-jawed reactionary Democrat, hurried a bill to repeal the President's $25,000 salary limit. Wary of a veto, Disney made his bill a rider on the Administration's urgent legislation raising the statutory limit of the national debt to $210,000,000,000. Franklin Roosevelt would have to sign that.

> The Senate's patient, plodding majority leader, Alben Barkley, stepped out of character as a loyal New Dealer, joined Missouri's Harry Truman in a furious attack on the Government's record in helping small business get war contracts. Said Alben Barkley: "I have held my tongue in my cheek as long as I am going to hold it there about this situation."

> Red-haired Senator Harry Byrd's Joint Economy Committee swung a haymaker at Government "quiz mania," counted 7,025 separate questionnaires and reports sent out by Federal agencies in 18 months. Day before, Byrd had warmed up in a ruckus over OWI's new magazine Victory. He promised investigation of all "Government propaganda ventures."

> The House aimed a three-gun battery at every Government department within range: 1) extended for two years the Dies investigation of un-American activities; 2) authorized the House Appropriations Committee to pry into every budgetary fact; 3) set up a new committee to investigate any Federal bureau from cellar to attic, on a citizen's complaint.

Howard Smith's Dream. Most far-reaching of all was the last. Virginia's wing-collared, labor-hating Howard W. Smith month ago drafted a resolution so astral it would throw open to inquiry any action, rule, procedure, regulation, order or directive taken or issued by any department or agency that anybody happened to complain about. House leaders took one look at it and said it would set Howard Smith and his committee above the Supreme Court. Others thought that by its terms he could investigate the White House itself. Smith denied it -- but his demands so alarmed his conservative colleagues that they forced him to tone his resolution down. Before the bill passed, Howard Smith took the floor, promised not to investigate the President's own orders or the affairs of the Army and Navy. Any other agency in the Government was fair game.

Bureaucrat's Nightmare. But it was left for the Senate's master spoilsman, bulb-nosed Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee, to launch a bill that was even more alarming to large chunks of official Washington. Under this bill, every Federal employe paid more than $4,500 a year (there are tens of thousands) would be subject to Senatorial approval. At its whim, under such a bill, the Senate could chop off the head of any Federal official it didn't like (particularly, it could guillotine TVA's David Lilienthal, McKellar's pet hate). Most alarming: if McKellar's bill reaches the floor, it is almost certain to pass.

Awakening? Franklin Roosevelt was well aware of this Congressional ferment. To meet it he had made only one preliminary counter-move--appointed a five-man interdepartmental committee, operating out of the Justice Department, to pass on subversive activities of Federal employes. This appeased nobody--nor did it begin to meet the great body of anti-Federal action now getting organized in Congress.

By week's end one fact was plain to all: Congress and the President were heading for a clash over authority that might rend the Government, seriously hamper the conduct of the war. Caution signals were sent up by the press. Said the New York Herald Tribune: "Little as any of us may fancy the bureaucracy under attack, we can agree that this is hardly the time to tear it apart. The object should be to curb and streamline it."

Said Eugene Meyer's Washington Post: "They [Congress] are striking at bureaucracy with a broad, sweeping motion, with few more scruples about keeping within their own sphere of action than the bureaucrats themselves have manifested. . . . The national interest clearly demands a retreat from encroachments by both sides."

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