Invasion Repulsed

No U.S. President has worked harder than Dwight Eisenhower to maintain friendly and constitutionally proper relationships with Congress. But last week, in the sharpest words he has yet addressed toward Capitol Hill, the President showed that his cooperative attitude does not extend to letting the legislative branch take over the functions of the executive.

In Section 638 of this year's $31.8 billion Defense Department appropriations bill, Congress stipulated that the Secretary of Defense must get permission from the Senate and. House Appropriations Committees before he takes the armed forces out of such nonmilitary activities as cake-baking, dry cleaning and coffee-roasting. The section was tacked on to the bill by members of the House and Senate whose districts vare graced with such federal activities, e.g., Leverett Saltonstall. the Senate G.O.P. whip, who was protecting the rope-twisting installation at the Charlestown, Mass, navy yard. President Eisenhower had a hard label for the Capitol Hill handiwork: "An unconstitutional invasion of the province of the executive."

"The [U.S.] Constitution divides the functions of the Government into three departments-the legislative, the executive and the judicial," wrote the President in an unusual message to Congress, "and establishes the principle that they shall be kept separate . . . The Congress has the power and right to grant or deny an appropriation. But once an appropriation is made, [it] must, under the Constitution, be administered by the executive branch of the Government alone, and the Congress has no right to confer upon its committees the power to veto executive action or to prevent executive action from becoming effective. Since the organization of our Government, the President has felt bound to insist that executive functions be maintained unimpaired by legislative encroachment, just as the legislative branch has felt bound to resist interference with its power by the executive."

The President said that he signed the appropriations bill for the sole reason that the Defense Department urgently needed the money. Then in a rare but not unprecedented step,* he announced flatly that the executive branch would pay no attention to the section that it considered invalid.

Last week the President also: P: Chided the Congress for its $140 million cut in Atomic Energy Commission funds, which the President said would disrupt work on atomic weapons and impede the development of nuclear propulsion and peaceful uses of atomic energy. Democratic Senator Clinton Anderson, Joint Atomic Energy Committee chairman, agreed that "the cuts did go too far," called a meeting of his committee to consider reinstating the AEC funds.

P: Visited Democratic Senate Leader Lyndon Johnson at the Bethesda (Md.) naval hospital, where Johnson is still confined after his recent heart attack (TIME, July 11).

P: Nominated Solicitor General Simon E. Sobeloff to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Maryland (Sobeloff's home state). West Virginia, Virginia, North and South Carolina circuit.

P: Studied and signed 65 congressional bills, thereby clearing his desk for Geneva.

* In a 1943 appropriations bill, Congress inserted a clause barring pay to three Government employees accused of radicalism. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt denounced the provision, pointed out that there had been no legal proceedings against the three, said he would ignore the congressional edict, was later upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.

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