Back to Work

Prepared to do their partisan best, Senators returned to Washington in August. It was the first post-convention session since 1948, when Harry Truman called back the 80th Congress and denounced it as "do-nothing." This time it was Congress returning of its own (or its leaders') volition because it had not done its work before the Republican and Democratic conventions.

There would probably be "more politics played" than ever before in congressional history, said New Hampshire's Styles Bridges, ranking Republican in the Senate, who as ever was prepared to do his part.

At the First Bang. It was bound to be spectacular, with three out of four members of the ticket in action: Richard M. Nixon presiding over the Senate, John F. Kennedy conspicuous on the Senate floor, aided and abetted by Lyndon B. Johnson in his post as majority leader. Only Henry Cabot Lodge was missing--and he was highly visible over at U.N.

The unfinished business included unpassed appropriations for mutual security and public works. But that was not the stuff to interest the galleries. The Democrats, with their majorities in the Senate and in the House (which reassembles a week later), planned to introduce their platform welfare promises one by one. If the President vetoed the bills, the Democrats would cry that Republicans placed more emphasis on budget balancing than on public needs. As a kind of sideshow to this main act, two Northern Republicans vowed to submit the Democratic civil-rights plank as a bill, hoping to watch Southern Democrats squirm.

Republicans were not going to let the Democrats have all the initiative. The President, between his vacation rounds at Newport, prepared a message to be read at the first gavel bang, before Democrats had a chance to do their own politicking. "There is much important work still pending that cannot await the selection and assembly of a new Congress and a new Administration," said Ike. Of 27 measures that he had requested before Congress adjourned for the conventions, he pointed out, only six had been acted upon. He called for an aid-to-education bill, medical aid for the aged, "constructive" farm measures, an increase in the minimum wage. And he added a warning that he would veto bills with unreasonably high price tags: "I shall not be a party to reckless spending schemes ... I shall not fail to resist inflationary pressures by whatever means are available to me."

To Feed the Hungry. Aware that both Nixon and Kennedy were suggesting that the U.S. should do more about defense, the President noted "changing Communist tactics and attitudes," announced that he had ordered the armed forces to take "certain practical measures" to increase their readiness, called for five new Polaris submarines (instead of three), added that it might be necessary to call for more defense appropriations later on.

Urging congressional support, Ike unwrapped two bold new programs of his own to "promote" free world stability. Both sound ideas, they had an unfortunate late-in-the-day, late-in-the-Administration sound about them. At the inter-American economic conference in Bogota, Colombia next month, Eisenhower said, the U.S. would put forward a new $600 million loan program for Latin America. And to the U.N. General Assembly, he went on, the U.S. would soon present a new food-for-peace plan for using the agricultural abundance of the U.S. to "feed the hungry of the world," letting the U.N. instead of the U.S. distribute it.

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