The Senate: Chaos At the Deadline

EVEN in the most tranquil of times the antiquated procedures and musty mechanisms of the U.S. Senate are barely able to cope with the basic demands stipulated in the Constitution. Last week, in a chamber filled with the grating emotions and cross purposes of determined men, the legislative machinery flew apart. "The Senate has gone out of control," scoffed a Republican leader from the more orderly House of Representatives. Conceded Senate Democratic Leader Mike Mansfield: "We are having filibusters--and filibusters on filibusters, and filibusters within filibusters."

Morass of Confusion. The causes of the chaos were multiple. The 91st Congress was in its dying days, and its weary members were clearly disgruntled that it had lasted so long; they yearned impatiently to break away from the capital and enjoy the holidays with the rest of the nation. Ambitious Senators were fighting to save or to kill bills on which their reputations were riding. Time was too short to pass even the measures that a majority clearly favored; in the crunch it was easy for a few men to thwart the will of the rest. At the same time, President Nixon angrily if belatedly joined the fray as some of his priority programs faced death; he berated the Senate for its tardiness and threatened to call a post-Christmas session of both chambers.

While the parliamentary skirmishing degenerated into a morass of confusion in which nothing seemed certain to pass, the basic issues at stake were sharply etched. In order of diminishing intensity of feeling, they came down to a classic confrontation over free trade, a sweeping reform of federal welfare programs, funding of a supersonic jet transport aircraft, and limitations on the President's power to authorize U.S. military operations in Cambodia. With only a few more scheduled working days, this is how those issues stood:

TRADE. President Nixon had proposed, and the House had passed, new restrictions on textile imports, partly to repay such Southern states as North and South Carolina for support in his election to the presidency. But a band of liberal Senators, led by Oklahoma Democrat Fred Harris and Republicans Charles Percy of Illinois and Jacob Javits of New York, argued that such protectionism represents a historic reversal of U.S. trade policy and threatens to upset international markets. They vowed that it would not pass, and they were willing to talk it to death. The import quotas, moreover, were thrown into a nightmarish omnibus bill by the Senate Finance Committee. The measure also includes a politically popular increase in Social Security benefits and elements of the President's welfare-reforming Family Assistance Plan. Unless the Senators somehow find a way to extract the trade measure, the entire package is likely to die.

WELFARE. President Nixon was finally pushing hard for his Family Assistance Plan, which would shift more of the cost of welfare to the Federal Government, and guarantee qualifying families a minimum annual income. While liberals consider the income levels inadequate and the bill full of technical flaws, there was hope that the general principle would be accepted. The House passed one version of the plan. But as the filibuster against trade quotas broke out in the Senate, the welfare plan seemed locked even more closely into the same bill and was almost certainly doomed. A key opponent of the plan, Delaware Republican John J. Williams, moved skillfully on the Senate floor to keep the contending forces at each other's throats and the welfare and trade measures joined.

THE SST. The Senate voted this month to deny the President any more funds to develop a supersonic transport, while the House had authorized the $290 million that the President had requested. A House-Senate conference committee tried to compromise the issue by granting $210 million for the plane. The Senate's Mansfield called this "a capitulation of the Senate position," while other SST critics more bluntly termed it a "betrayal" and "a rape of the will of the Senate." Vowed one: "We're not going to lay over for the old men in the conference committees, who are in league with the old men in the House." A filibuster was promptly launched against the $210 million project by Wisconsin Democrat William Proxmire, who opposes the SST on cost and ecological grounds. He was joined by Democratic presidential prospect Edmund Muskie. Republican Leader Hugh Scott marshaled a vote to choke off the filibuster, but it fell far short of the two-thirds vote required.

CAMBODIA. Antiwar Senators including J. William Fulbright succeeded in attaching amendments to two separate bills meant to prevent President Nixon from using any more funds to send U.S. troops or military advisers into Cambodia: a $66 billion defense appropriations measure, and a $1 billion foreign aid authorization. The language in the defense bill was so altered by a House-Senate conference committee that the limitation was rendered ineffective--and another Senate wrangle was shaping up over that.

Dilatory Approach. The battles were not yet over, and it seemed likely that the Senate was about to deny the President his welfare reform and trade quotas, and might still shoot down the SST. It had not even bothered to consider one of his most desired programs: a system of sharing federal tax revenues with the states. It had so altered another Nixon reform, a manpower retraining act designed to consolidate various antipoverty programs, that the President last week vetoed the resulting bill. His main complaint was that it provided too much money for what he called "dead-end, W.P.A.-type" public service jobs.

The impasse between the President and the Senate was partly the fault of Nixon's lack of personal liaison with Senators. His harsh attacks on Democratic legislators in the recent elections did not exactly improve the atmosphere. But much of the blame lies with the Senators' own dilatory approach to the nation's business and to their fondness for passe procedure (see box). Carefully reasoned opposition to presidential programs is a senatorial prerogative. But procrastination over many long months until issues must be decided in the acrimonious atmosphere of deadline pressure is a shirking of responsibility in which the Senate, the President--and ultimately the nation-- all suffer.

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