Mail from Home

Fifteen members of the Senate Agriculture Committee gathered around their coffin-shaped conference table to consider the House farm bill and plowed into the task with astonishing efficiency. Behind their workmanlike approach last week was a revelation: mail from home has indicated that the farm revolt has been brewing less on the land than in the minds of election-sensitive politicians.

With this in mind, the committeemen shed coats and went to work, blocking out a Senate version that contained the soil-bank program President Eisenhower had asked for (but no advance payments). Plagued by conditioned political reflexes, some members could not resist adding filigree. The outstanding ornament: a proviso that growers of feed grain (oats, barley, etc.) who do not comply with 1957 acreage allotments receive special supports based on those the President has recommended for commercial corngrowers who exceed allotments.

Republicans George D. Aiken and John J. Williams rejected the finished bill outright, and three other members (two Democrats, one Republican) joined them in a minority report rejecting the feed-grain support clause. It was, they agreed, "the kind of contradiction which caused the President to veto the original farm bill," and would boost costs for dairy, livestock and poultry farmers. The full Senate, considering the bill this week, would have to decide how much attention to pay to the mail and how much to the filigree.

Also last week:

P:The House approved (377-0) the $33,635,066,000 Defense Appropriation Bill (which includes the President's added-starter request of $248 million for 29 more B-52s). An amendment to force on the Administration an extra $1 billion for still more B-52s was shouted down after Texas Democrat George Mahon declared that the Air Force lacked both crews and bases to cope with so sudden a production step-up in intercontinental bombers.

P:Principally on the urgings of Senators from flood-suffering New York and New England, the Senate approved (61-7) and sent to the House a bill authorizing the U.S. to sell $5 billion worth of flood insurance and pay 40% of the policy costs. The program sets limits of $10,000 for a house and $250,000 for an individual or corporation, amounts to a pilot test to see how the Government can operate most effectively in a high-premium field that private insurance companies shun.

P:After listening to a bitter Eastland-McCarthy attack on Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee approved a bill to restore to the states the power to punish subversion and sedition against the U.S. Government, a power removed by a Supreme Court ruling (TIME. April 16) that the Federal Government has sole jurisdiction over subversion and sedition cases.

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