Down with the Dole

On the floor of the House one afternoon last week, Arkansas Democrat Wilbur Mills manfully walked over and reached out a congratulatory hand to Republican Whip Leslie Arends of Illinois. Arends smiled broadly, said: "Sorry to do this to you, Wilbur." What Arends and his G.O.P. colleagues had done was indeed worth a handshake. With a remarkable rebuke to Ways & Means Chairman Mills, the House, after two days of strenuous debate, voted down a $1.5 billion Democratic proposal for extending unemployment compensation benefits that President Eisenhower had called "a dole." Passed instead, with minor revisions, was the moderate $587 million bill originally proposed by the Eisenhower Administration as a temporary measure.

The Administration measure extended unemployment compensation payments 50% beyond state limits (which now range from 16 to 30 weeks, depending on state laws), with the Federal Government lending the money to the states. But no sooner had the proposal reached Capitol Hill than House Ways & Means Committee Democrats came up with a far more lavish plan. The committee approved (16-9) a bill providing a flat 16 extra weeks' compensation (TIME, April 28), airily ruling out repayment by the states. The Democrats boosted the bill's cost about three-quarters of a billion dollars by the 16-week ruling and by specifying coverage for 900,000 seasonal laborers, fishermen, government employees and others, who cannot now qualify for state compensation payments. The Democratic version won House Speaker Sam Rayburn's approval. And it headed for the floor under the aegis of Ways & Means Chairman Mills, who as head of a prestige-heavy committee could expect his recommendations, merit aside, to be accepted by the majority party almost without question.

Retreat to the Queen. Mills, in his first important test since he became Ways & Means boss last January, reckoned without another House chairman with rank as imperial and voice as loud. When the Democratic version reached the Rules Committee for processing, Virginia's cautious, wily Howard Smith took one look and decided he didn't like it. Too many votes were stacked against him for Rules Chairman Smith to pigeonhole the measure alongside other pieces of legislation that have displeased him in the past. But the bill, when the Rules Committee voted it out for consideration last week, carried a potentially crippling rule, i.e., during the six-hour debate it would be open to any and all floor amendments.

Cigar-chewing, face-screwing Howard Smith had only begun to operate. It was a bill on which Northern Republicans and Southern conservative Democrats, disenchanted with each other since last year's civil rights fight, could come together. Smith helped round up some 60 dissident Southerners. Minority Leader Joe Martin caucused the Republicans, kept them in line behind the Eisenhower version of the bill. As debate opened at midweek, Republican strength had become so obvious that Sam Rayburn gave up the battle and ducked off to Virginia to crown Her Majesty, the queen of the Shenandoah Apple Blossom Festival.

On to the Senate. Left to run the show, Wilbur Mills and Majority Leader John McCormack did as well as they could. Cried McCormack: "It is the old battle of the forces of progressive outlook against those of status quo, the old battle of service to the people." Workers who are not covered by compensation, pleaded Mills, "get just as hungry, their children suffer just as much." Missouri Republican Thomas B. Curtis offered a reasoned rebuttal: extending compensation for eligible jobless and taking them off welfare eases the strain on welfare rolls so that they can better carry the uninsured jobless. But Virginia's Smith was more direct. The Democratic proposal, said he, "is pure, unadulterated, undisguised, unabridged and unabashed socialism . . . Why do this if it is not just purely and simply vote-getting politics?" Taking advantage of the amendment rule, Florida Democrat A. Sydney Herlong Jr. introduced a substitute that was the Eisenhower proposal with two small revisions: 1) states were not obliged to accept federal funds, and 2) start of the period of eligibility was pushed back from Ike's Jan. 1, 1958 to July 1, 1957. By a 223-165 vote, the House agreed to take up the Herlong substitute. Then, battle over and Democrats defeated, the Administration version was routinely passed (370-17) and sent to the Senate, which in all probability would approve.

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