Clear the Decks

The Senate's Republican Policy Committee unlimbered a heavy-caliber political weapon last week. To clear the way for a Republican President next January, it announced that the Senate would confirm no more presidential appointments before the session's end. The decision affected some 1,000 civilian vacancies, 859 of them postmasterships. The only exceptions would be for the military and for Cabinet officers.

In their own defense, Republicans pointed out that in 1932 a Democratic Congress had ignored 1,727 of Herbert Hoover's 2,903 appointees. But that was in a lame-duck session after Hoover had already been defeated for reelection. With President Truman already hard-pressed to find good men for Government jobs, the Republican decision meant that he would find it even harder to fill interim vacancies for the next eight months.

Earlier in the week another political sirocco had blown through the Capitol. Indiana's Senator Homer Capehart read to his Senate colleagues excerpts from "Voice of America" broadcasts prepared for the State Department by the National Broadcasting Co. and beamed to Latin America last winter.

The scripts had referred to Wyoming as the "most cordial. . . most fertile . . . most primitive" of states, to Utah as the state "where men have as many wives as they can support." In Nevada, the "two principal cities are in competition. In Las Vegas people get married and in Reno they get divorced." New England, said the scripts, was "founded by hypocrisy" and Texas "by sin."

While the Senate sputtered and raged, thin, harried George Allen, the ex-ambassador to Iran who took over the Voice after the silly broadcasts had been made, admitted the State Department's failure to monitor its own broadcasts. NBC, which conceded its own negligence, had already fired those responsible for the scripts. The whole graceless affair was a prime example of how Congress, in an election year, can hold itself at arm's length and punch its own nose. For Congress had 1) given the Voice so little money that it was unable to keep the frog out of its throat; 2) insisted that private companies, wherever possible, be called in to do the work.

Last week the Senate also:

P:Voted to admit 200,000 D.P.s during the next two years (double the committee figure).

P: Received from its Finance Committee the House-passed bill repealing oleo taxes (TIME, May 10), with an amendment requiring restaurants to label each serving of margarine with an identifying notice.

The House:

P: Shelved, and thereby virtually killed, home rule for the District of Columbia, which has been governed by congressional committee for 70 years. P: Ignored Secretary George Marshall's urgent request for a three-year extension of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, the nation's most successful experiment in economic internationalism. Instead, it voted to extend the act for one year only, adding a provision which would bring major tariff changes under congressional veto. Senator Arthur Vandenberg announced that when the bill reached the Senate he would do his best to take the veto out again.

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