Butting the Wall

For the fifth time since Dwight Eisenhower took office in 1953, the U.S. Congress last week tried to override a presidential veto--and for the fifth time it failed. Last week's Senate vote of 55-40, nine short of the two-thirds majority needed to override, came on the $1,375,000,000 housing bill, which Ike had vetoed in his battle to keep the nation's budget in balance. The issue was forced by the Senate's Democratic liberals, desperately anxious to get out from under the President's firm fiscal thumb. In insisting on an attempt to override, they exposed themselves and their party to a needless and humiliating defeat.

Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, a master at the art of the possible, had argued against the attempt. "We told them there wasn't a chance of overriding that veto," says a Johnson aide. "They wouldn't listen. They wanted to butt their heads against a wall." Said Johnson after the vote, in pointed reference to his liberal colleagues: "We didn't kid anybody but ourselves." Next day the Senate Banking and Currency Committee approved a substitute, trimmed-down housing bill of $1,050,000,000--$240 million above the amount recommended by President Eisenhower, but perhaps low enough to avoid another veto.

In other action last week:

P:The House Ways & Means Committee, after weeks of indecision, approved by 16 to 9 a 1-c--per-gallon increase in the 3-c- federal gasoline tax, effective Sept. 1, to keep the 41,000-mile interstate-highway program rolling (see BUSINESS).

P:The Senate reversed its Finance Committee, voted 75-20 to increase the non-service-connected disability pensions of more than 1,100,000 veterans and their widows and orphans. The payoff, long advocated by the American Legion, would amount to $10 billion, spread over 40 years. The House, by voice vote, went along with the Senate, but the chances of the bill escaping a veto were slight.

P:The Senate, by a 47-45 vote, passed and sent to the House the year's weirdest bill: a Democratic-sponsored measure to establish, in prosperous 1959, a federal youth-conservation corps modeled after the New Deal's Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps. Under its terms, some 150,000 males, aged 16 to 21, would eventually serve for terms ranging from six months to two years, receive $60 a month, plus room, board and transportation. The bill had about as much chance of beating a veto as the Washington Senators have of winning the World Series.

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