Some Stern Tests Ahead

Back to business, Congress--and Carter--face key decisions

"I am not the President's man," Senate I Majority Leader Robert Byrd keeps saying. "I am the Senate's man." As Congress reconvenes this week after a month's recess, President Carter may well wonder just who, if anybody, is the President's man. His friends are displaying a new balkiness, his enemies a new boldness. While mounting opposition to a President is predictable, Carter is especially dependent on a dexterous balancing of allies who have little, if anything, in common. These allies are bound to grow impatient with one another and especially with Carter. As that happens, Carter is bound to discover, as many have before him, that the nation's most powerful job can also be the loneliest.

The Senate will pose some of the sternest tests for Carter. There his major projects are most in danger of sinking. In the House he can count on the support of Speaker Tip O'Neill. He has no such ally in the upper chamber. Not only is Byrd more aloof and elusive than O'Neill, but the Senate barons who control the important committees owe nothing to Carter, and in some cases are hostile. Where the President needs the most strength, he is the weakest. John Sparkman, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is 77 and too exhausted to lead the forces for the Panama Canal Treaty, which would relinquish control of the waterway to Panama by the year 2000. Other members of the committee may also not have the stomach for the fight.

Even so, the Administration will not lose that battle for lack of trying. Selling the treaty is the top item on the President's agenda--an all-out effort to score a clear-cut foreign policy success amid a series of setbacks. "Carter is deploying his lieutenants the way George Gordon Meade did at Gettysburg," says a Pentagon officer who has briefed Congressmen on the treaty. "And that was a hell of a fight too."

Carter has lined up some impressive artillery. The usually hawkish AFL-CIO President George Meany was persuaded to support the treaty after Carter guaranteed job rights for Canal Zone workers. Former Secretary of State Dean Rusk warned that rejection of the agreement could lead to bloodshed and the commitment of U.S. troops. General George S. Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, summoned 75 retired generals and admirals to a meeting to drum up support for the treaty. Former Democratic National Committee Chairman Robert Strauss, about to depart for trade talks in Tokyo, was rerouted to Capitol Hill, where his yarn-spinning charm was put to work on wavering Congressmen.

The whole lobbying effort will reach a high point this week when the treaty is signed at the Pan American Union building in Washington. On hand will be 15 heads of state from Latin America, the largest gathering of its kind in the hemisphere since 1967. Whether this televised inter-American consensus will prove effective is another matter. White House mail is running 8 to 1 against the treaty. Administration head counters claim that 58 Senators are already willing to vote in favor of the pact; only nine more would give Carter the two-thirds approval he needs, but they may prove hard to get. Opponents, meanwhile, talk of stalling the treaty with parliamentary motions or hobbling it with reservations.

Heavy concentration on the canal has overshadowed other matters, notably the SALT talks originally scheduled for this week in Vienna. They have now been postponed until the end of the month, when Secretary of State Cyrus Vance will sit down with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in Washington and later in New York. Vance, just back from his none-too-fruitful meetings in China, was in no mood to rush off to another exhausting, frustrating round of negotiations. The Administration wants congressional backing to extend the expiration date of SALT I beyond Oct. 3, keeping alive what Rusk calls "history's longest permanent floating crap game."

Carter scored a striking success in moving much of his energy program through the House under the guidance of Tip O'Neill. But in the Senate he faces opposition from Finance Chairman Russell Long, who claims there is no energy shortage. It is all there in the ground, Long argues--oil, shale, coal and gas--ready to be extracted if private industry is given incentives like price deregulation.

The President's plan for refinancing Social Security is in similar trouble. The Senate Finance Committee has already voted 11 to 3 against the use of general tax revenues to shore up the near-bankrupt fund; the House is expected to do the same. In addition, Carter wants to boost payroll taxes for employers alone, but Congress is expected to approve a stop-gap hike in taxes for both employers and employees. Welfare reform is coming under increasing attack from groups that feel threatened by it. Labor, for example, is worried that the creation of 1.4 million public-service jobs at the $2.30 minimum-wage level will have a depressing effect on wage scales around the country.

Even farther down on the congressional agenda is the long-awaited tax-reform program. The President is expected to propose a plan later this month. But advance information that capital gains will be taxed as ordinary income has already aroused stiff opposition among businessmen. Scenting an issue, House Minority Leader John Rhodes thundered: "Poor economic policies have created a bad case of the jitters among the American people." Rhodes called for an across-the-board tax cut to prevent another recession. Al Ullman, Democratic chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, made the same plea. For most members of Congress as well as the public, tax reform means a tax cut--period. That is not what it means to Carter.

On top of all his other problems, the President last week caught a blast from close allies in his run for the White House, America's blacks. Convinced that they were responsible for Carter's election, they are now claiming what they feel is their due. A group of 15 black leaders met in New York to blast the Administration for "callous neglect" of urban black problems. Bolstering their complaint was a Labor Department report that summertime unemployment among black youths had reached 34.8%--an all-time high; the jobless rate for white youths, meanwhile, stood at 12.6%. George Meany echoed the blacks' complaint by rebuking Carter for putting a balanced budget ahead of a full-employment program. "If we do [balance the budget], all our problems will be over," scoffed Meany, his zest for combat undimmed by his 83 years. "There will be dancing in the streets of the ghettos, and I think even Moscow might put up a white flag of surrender."

When Vernon Jordan, executive director of the National Urban League, accused Carter six weeks ago of reneging on his campaign promises to blacks, the President reacted heatedly and suggested that Jordan had been "demagogic." But Carter was sufficiently impressed by last week's criticism to promise that he would get started soon on a new urban policy to arrest the decay of the cities and provide more jobs. The emphasis would be on incentives for greater private investment in areas now shunned as too risky. The President asked the black leaders to "hang in there" until he got his policy under way. But that, in effect, is what he is asking of just about every group as he tries to put his principles into practice. How long they will continue to hang in will determine the success of his presidency.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.