Republican Rumble

The 89th Congress has churned out Great Society legislation so efficiently this year that it has sometimes seemed like a precision-tooled machine. But last week the House put on a display of parliamentary absurdity and just plain orneriness that reminded everyone that Congress is, after all, an assemblage of peccable men.

The rumble came about when Speaker John McCormack, anxious to speed toward adjournment, tried to force sev en bills out of the Rules Committee by applying the "21 -Day Rule," passed last January. It provides that if a bill has been held in committee for 21 days, it can be blasted out by a majority vote on the floor. Republicans and some Southern Democrats thought McCormack was being too highhanded.

Scarcely had the chaplain said amen to the opening prayer when Missouri Republican Durward Hall demanded the entire journal of the preceding session be read. The clerk had barely begun to drone when Minority Whip Leslie Arends of Illinois leaped up and demanded a quorum count, which includes a full roll call of the House. McCormack had to comply. The count ate up half an hour. It was hardly finished when Iowa Republican H. R. Gross asked for another. And so it went all afternoon and into the night. Majority Leader Carl Albert accused the opposition of filibustering. Tempers frazzled, blood pressures rose, and the House stayed dead center until McCormack at last agreed to ask for only four bills. When the session ended at 12:31 a.m., the House had nothing more to show for its time than 1) four resolutions that simply allowed legislation to come to the floor, and 2) a new alltime record of 22 slowdown roll calls in a single session.

Next day, and for the rest of the week, the Capitol Hill machine was purring as smoothly as ever. In other action, the Congress:

> Approved, in a House-Senate conference that virtually assured passage by both houses, a $46.9 billion defense appropriations bill for fiscal 1966--including a special $1.7 billion war chest for Viet Nam requested by the President in August. In a rebuff to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, conferees rejected his merge-and-conserve proposal to make the organized Army Reserve part of the National Guard, reducing their combined total manpower from 700,000 to 550,000 and simplifying the chain of command.

> Rejected, by a 208-to-179 vote in the House, the Administration's $1.8 billion anti-poverty bill after it had been cleared by a Senate-House conference. Republican-led opposition centered on a House-approved section, allowing Governors a veto over federal community action programs proposed for their states. Some such clause will probably be reinstated in a later joint conference, but passage of the bill could be delayed until next month.

> Passed, by a 63-to-14 vote in the Senate, a slightly watered down $320 million road beautification bill to provide for junkyard cleanups and billboard controls along federally financed highways. As originally reported out of the Senate Public Works Committee, the measure would have withdrawn all federal highway funds from any state that did not effectively curtail unsightly billboard advertising within 660 feet of federal-aid highways. The bill's punitive powers were cut by an amendment providing for withdrawal of only 10% of federal road money in such cases.

> Rejected, by a 228-to-143 vote in the House, a petition from the predominantly Negro Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenging the seating of five white Mississippi Congressmen on the grounds that 1) Freedom Democrats had not been allowed to enter candidates, and 2) most Mississippi Negroes could not vote in 1964. After two days of closed-door hearings, the House Administration Committee recommended that in future the House should "carefully scrutinize" elections for evidence of racial discrimination.

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