The Big Split

The first clear sign of a change in Democratic leadership signals came during a Senate-House conference meeting on the airport improvement bill. For three months, Oklahoma Democrat Mike Monroney, knowledgeable specialist in the jet age, had held out doggedly for the Senate's fat, $465 million airport-construction bill as opposed to the House's $297 million version. Then, one day last fortnight, influential Senator Monroney breezed into a committee session and recommended that the committee forget both bills, simply extend for two years the current airport aid of $63 million a year--only $6.000,000 more than the President had asked. Last week the extension quietly passed both houses.

Just who talked to Mike Monroney is his secret, but it is an open secret on Capitol Hill that the fellow Texans, House Speaker Sam Rayburn and Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, have made a deliberate new policy decision: the congressional leadership sees no profit in fighting President Eisenhower's legislative program, will go along pretty much with what the President wants for the rest of the session. And the decision, in turn, has signaled the widest and bitterest split in the Democratic Party in years.

Right Turn. It is not the familiar old civil-rights split between North and South (which has been pretty well bridged this session), but a growing, widening fault line between the Johnson-Rayburn moderates and the liberals, who read last November's 283-153 House victory and 64-34 Senate victory as a mandate for massive federal spending programs. The Democratic National Committee, chaired by fiery Paul Butler, has all but broken off relations with congressional leaders. Last week the dolittle, talk-much Democratic Advisory Council (among the members: Adlai Stevenson, Harry Truman. Soapy Williams) fired another salvo at Johnson & Co.: "[The voters] expect and are entitled to have in this Congress more tangible results of the mandate they gave the Democratic majority last November than they have received to date."

Even some of Johnson's steadiest fellow Senators are uneasy: word leaked out last week that Massachusetts' Jack Kennedy had joined Minnesota's Hubert Humphrey, Pennsylvania's Joe Clark, Michigan's Pat McNamara and Illinois' Paul Douglas in a quiet move last month to draw up their own legislative program --a move that Johnson nipped by incorporating some of their suggestions into the official party program.

Budget on Main Street. The man really responsible for the Democratic split is none other than the lame-duck (by XXII Amendment) President of the U.S., whom Johnson had written off last January in his own "State of the Union" message to fellow Democrats. With the help of a booming economy, Dwight Eisenhower has managed to sell his balanced budget on Main Street. (Says New Hampshire Republican Norris Cotton: "A lot of fellows used to tell me how alarmed people were back home about the budget, but I never believed it. My voters never cared about these big problems down in Washington. But this year, for the first time, I find the people on Main Street are really concerned about spending.") In defense of his program, the President has learned to use the veto--and threats of veto--effectively. Strongly supported by Republicans in House and Senate, and also by the new chairman of the Republican National Committee, Kentucky's Thruston Morton, the President holds the initiative. Since the Gallup polls have shown the Republican Party in general to be slipping badly (TIME, June 8), the Democratic liberals want to build a record by challenging Ike; Rayburn and Johnson want to ride with him.

Last week, in the propwash of the airport aid bill, Congress was riding with him. Items:

P:The Senate went along with the House, approved the Administration's request to raise the interest limit on privately financed mortgages for veterans' homes from 4! to 51%.

P:Senate and House conferees shaved .more than $1 billion and four years off the Senate version of the omnibus housing bill, agreed on a two-year, $1,375,400,000 appropriation in the hope that it would escape the veto.

P:The House voted to raise the temporary limit on the national debt to $295 billion--precisely what Ike had requested.

P:The House rejected a compromise farm bill for higher wheat supports and restricted acreage, thus headed off a move to make the farm subsidy mess even worse.

Committed to the new conservatism and convinced that it is what the public wants, Lyndon Johnson thinks he can foresee the next step. The country, he implies, wants a moderate President to go with the moderate legislative program next year. A Democratic moderate. Obviously, somebody like Lyndon Johnson.

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