Getting Restless

Adjournment was in the air and Congressmen were itching to get back home for some electioneering. Impatient and brisk as a commuter trying to make a train, the Senate bundled a lot of legislation into a drawer and pushed it out of sight. Republican Floor Leader Kenneth Wherry looked at Majority Floor Leader Scott Lucas' list of 22 "must" bills, and agreed to cooperate if it was whittled down to six: expansion of social security, extension of the draft and MAP, the omnibus $29 billion appropriation bill, a bill cutting excise taxes, and a final attempt to pass FEPC. Said Ohio's Robert A. Taft with a grin: "Our part of the deal would be to keep the boys from talking." Adjournment target: August 5.

The House was already well ahead of schedule. Last week it passed an extension of rent control, quickly ironed out minor differences with the Senate's bill. Democrats on its Ways & Means Committee, who have been tinkering despondently with the bill cutting excise taxes $1,100,000,000, produced a new proposal to meet Harry Truman's warning that he would veto any bill which did not make up the revenue elsewhere. It would increase taxes on large corporation profits from the present 38% to 41% to bring in $433,000,000. With the prospect of another $500 million from plugging loopholes in other tax laws, the committeemen hoped to get their excise tax cuts past the President.

In the Senate, a citizen could note the lasting effects of the social revolution wrought by the New Deal. Up for debate was a bill which would nearly double social-security benefits (from the present average $26 a month to $48), extend coverage to 10 million more Americans, and provide increased payroll deductions beginning in 1956. But the issue which seemed revolutionary in 1935 last week did not even start a cloakroom argument. If there was objection, it was that the coverage was too spotty; Republicans and Democrats agreed on a $25,000 study of a future pay-as-you-go system that would cover every American over the age of 65.

That just about settled Item Number One of Wherry's six. Senators wistfully wished that everything else on the "must" list could be settled as quickly.

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