Action on Capitol Hill

With adjournment of Congress scheduled for the month's end, the President last week put his weight behind three major items of his program. His score: one victory, one advance, one setback. The victory: the Senate's ratification of a NATO agreement on G.I. crimes.

Advance: Refugees. Utah's Republican Senator Arthur Watkins, sponsor of the Administration bill to admit 240,000 refugees from NATO and Iron Curtain countries, asked the President to lend a hand in the hard-fought battle to get the bill reported out against the stubborn opposition of Nevada's Pat McCarran and Idaho's Herman Welker. Ike invited Watkins and McCarran to the White House, flatly turned down McCarran's compromise proposal to admit 124,000 refugees. Bolstered, Watkins went back to Capitol Hill and got a Judiciary Committee majority (not including McCarran) to agree to hold an evening session "until we're through." Result, after hours of wrangling: a bill to admit 220,000 over the course of three years. McCarran threatened to keep up the fight against the bill.

Setback: Foreign Aid. A few days after Congress authorized $5,157,000,000 Mutual Security aid in fiscal 1954, the President, keeping well below the ceiling, submitted a request for $5,124,000,000 in specific MSA appropriations. But the House committee, led by New York's John Taber, knocked $705 million off the request.

Other events on Capitol Hill during the week:

P:The Senate passed and sent to the President (who promptly signed it) the Administration bill to extend the excess-profits tax for six months.

P:The Senate Appropriations Committee, restoring some $77 million cut by the House, approved a defense appropriation total of $34.5 billion, $1.2 billion under the economy mark set by the President.

P:Two rookies took their places on the Hill. Vice President Nixon swore in Alton A. Lennon, 46, North Carolina lawyer, as successor (by gubernatorial appointment) to the late Senator Willis Smith. House Speaker Martin swore in James B. Bowler, 78, Chicago alderman, as successor (by victory in a by-election) to the late 23-term Representative Adolph Sabath.

P:Senate Republicans, and Democrats, too, found cheer in a bulletin from New York Hospital: "Senator Taft's condition is good. [He] fully expects to resume public duty in Washington when Congress convenes in January."

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