King

From the first, the 90th Congress has suffered from a decidedly schizophrenic personality--free-spending and liberal in the Senate, tight-fisted and curmudgeonly in the House of Representatives. Last week, when the long-pending Truth-in-Lending bill came to a vote in the House, the roles were reversed. Where the Senate last summer diluted the measure to assure its passage, the House not only clapped back everything that had been stripped from it but broadened it considerably.

The bill requires creditors to tell prospective borrowers the true rate of interest they must pay and the dollars-and-cents cost of the loan as well. The House strengthened it by requiring department stores and mail-order houses that offer "revolving credit" to list the interest charges as 18% a year instead of the more innocuous-looking 1 1/2% a month. Mortgages were also affected; lenders will now have to specify, in dol lars and cents, how much such long-term charges as interest will cost the buyer (a 25-year, 6% mortgage on a $20,000 house, for example, would cost him $18,391 in interest).

Final Victory. Although the Senate version excused loans with less than $10 interest, the House put them back in the bill, because small loans are the ones that most often soak the poor. A Republican amendment even made loan sharking a federal crime worth a max imum 25-year prison term. The House demonstrated its greatest solicitude for consumers, however, in an amendment to guard the first $30 of any paycheck from garnishment actions, in which creditors sue employers for part of a debtor's salary. Garnishments were limited to 10% of anything over $30, and employers were barred from firing workers because of the first garnishment--a widespread practice.

Though politics is the art of compromise, the bill owes much to the stubbornness of one Congresswoman from St. Louis. Democratic Representative Leonor Sullivan, an eight-term veteran who lost battle after battle to strengthen the measure in committee hearings, carried her lonely but vigorous fight to the floor of the House, finally won with an overwhelming 382-to-4 vote.

When the Truth-in-Lending bill goes to conference committee with the Senate, the previously timid upper chamber will find that the House has grown markedly militant, fed by favorable publicity and heavy public approval. Five consumer measures have already been passed by the 90th Congress, and more are on the way--prompting Lyndon Johnson, in his State of the Union message last month, to describe it as "the Consumer Congress." For the time being at least, the American consumer reigns as king of Capitol Hill.

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