A Plague on Both Your Houses

Congress recessed last week for its own ten-day version of the Labor Day weekend, its direction so uncertain, its temper so fractious that few would be so bold as to forecast its final record.

While the House could barely muster enough members to pass its own recess resolution, the Senate was in full session, with members of two committees thumbing their noses respectively at their colleagues in the House and their leader in the White House.

In its gesture toward the House, the Senate Appropriations Committee gave President Johnson a much needed legislative victory. Not only did it give him more than double (to $537 million) the sum that the House had reluctantly voted for the model-cities program; it also approved his $40 million request for rent subsidies, which had been killed in tow by the House. Though both measures must still be approved by the full Senate, there is a good chance that both will emerge intact for a fifty-fifty compromise with the House.

"I Don't Care." The Senate Labor Committee, on the other hand, rebuked the Administration by implication for its phlegmatic reaction to the urban crisis. Giving Johnson far more than he had asked, it added $200 million to his request for the war on poverty (for a total $2.26 billion), initiated an entirely new two-year, $2.5 billion program, similar to one proposed by the Urban Coalition, to provide jobs for 200,000 slum dwellers, and authorized $300 million for small businesses hurt by riots.

Though the program has little chance of passage in the House--even if it gets through the full Senate--it was nonetheless a considerable embarrassment to the President, who would dearly like to appear as the champion of the cities, yet faces a $29 billion budget deficit that inhibits him from proposing any new and costly reforms that might strike at the heart of the urban malaise.

The majority of the Labor Committee was not concerned with the President's feelings. "I don't care," said New York's Republican Jacob Javits. "It's time that at least one congressional committee stood up to the President and let him know that it can see what is needed in the cities and has the guts to go ahead and propose it." Nor is the mood of frustrated independence likely to change after the recess is over. "We not only don't know the answers ourselves," said one Republican Senator, "but we are completely convinced that nobody else knows them either--particularly the Administration."

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