86th Congress: Eisenhower's Record
DUSCHA, JULIUS
86th Congress: Eisenhower's Record By Julius Duscha WASHINGTON THE RECORD of the first session of the 86th Congress bears a distinctive Eisenhower brand, despite the President's protests to the...
...As the group's recent report indicated, the Commission can serve as a useful bridge for understanding between the North and the South...
...As it turned out...
...As for the issue of Government economy, many members of Congress obviously consider it to be politically appealing...
...When the session convened last January, no one dreamed that it would be an Eisenhower Congress...
...He had to settle for tea, canapes and talk with 25 Senators who gathered late one afternoon in the Foreign Relations Committee room...
...could make the critter stand still long enough to burn a Texas-style political brand into its hide...
...The case for the expenditure of more rather than less tax money is a compelling one in these times of startling Soviet scientific and military achievements and crowded American streets, cities and schools...
...It was Halleck who managed to round up the votes needed to sustain the vetoes with which President Eisenhower peppered Congress...
...But no Congressional leader has shown any disposition to come out on the side of strength through taxation...
...this is a curious issue...
...The labor bill was certainly the most controversial legislation passed during the session...
...The import of the President's insistence that Congress pass the kind of legislation he wanted probably can best be understood when it is realized that the Democratic majority this year was the largest since 1937...
...nor House Speaker Sam Rayburn (D.Tex...
...The slight change in the Senate rules that was made last January did not result in the approval of any significant civil rights legislation this year, and is not likely to assure passage of a civil rights bill next year either...
...There are 283 Democrats and only 153 Republicans in the House...
...The principal achievement of Congress this year was probably the admission of Hawaii as the nation's 50th state...
...It is an issue that few voters understand...
...At stake in the public works bill was a handful of piddling rivers and harbors, projects that could have no effect on the nation's welfare...
...But these existed in much the same places before the recession, and Congress still does not seem to know what to do about thern...
...Eisenhower did not quite make Lyndon Johnson...
...the session was adjourned only a few hours before the Russian TU-114 jet bearing Khrushchev and his party landed at Andrews Air Force Base just outside Washington...
...Halleck lost only once, and that was in the final days of the session when Congress overrode the President's second veto of a public works "pork barrel" bill...
...But just as Lewis was able to survive Taft-Hartley...
...Yet the provisions in the legislation which rearrange the balance of power between labor and management are far more significant than the sections of the bill which seek to insure by law honesty and democracy within the labor movement...
...Although Hawaii's statehood was almost a foregone conclusion after Alaska finally was accepted last year, the making of a new state, especially one with the melting-pot characteristics of Hawaii, will undoubtedly be remembered longer than either the President's vetoes or the new labor legislation...
...The session began and ended with a civil rights debate, but Congress did very little to protect the rights of Negroes...
...The general recovery from the recession was much faster than anyone had anticipated...
...The Lewis Strauss hearings were the closest Congress got to a real investigation this year, and the defeat of the Strauss nomination for Secretary of Commerce was as much the result of the way in which Strauss handled himself before the committee as it was a result of Senatorial fact-finding...
...Whatever one thinks of the results of deliberations in the Senate and the House this year, however, the first session of the 86th Congress was remarkable in many respects...
...Not only did Khrushchev's impending arrival serve to accelerate the adjournment activities of almost everyone on Capitol Hill except Senator Wayne Morse (D.-Ore...
...In fact, this year's labor legislation probably will hurt weak unions far more than strong ones...
...At times, Johnson and Rayburn seemed as eager to disprove the Republican charge that Democrats are spendthrifts as the President was to press the allegation...
...This perhaps explains at least in part the solid Southern support for the tough provisions of the House bill...
...The extension of the life of the Civil Rights Commission for two years, which Congress approved just before it adjourned, was welcomed by its advocates...
...There are, of course, some persons in Washington who believe that the session had best be forgotten...
...Eisenhower indicated at his news conference two weeks ago that he felt Congress was particularly irresponsible in its failure to raise the rates to facilitate government borrowing...
...The relatively small number of liberals on Capitol Hill couldn't even lasso the animal...
...But more than reports are needed, and Congress is seemingly incapable of doing much more than debating the civil rights issues and providing poultices for them...
...However, no one expects Congress to deal with such overwhelming problems as the farm surplus in the midst of next year's Presidential politicking...
...86th Congress: Eisenhower's Record By Julius Duscha WASHINGTON THE RECORD of the first session of the 86th Congress bears a distinctive Eisenhower brand, despite the President's protests to the contrary...
...Neither Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson (D.-Tex...
...The measure is the first important labor legislation to be approved by Congress since the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947...
...One of its principal results will undoubtedly be to make it even more difficult than it has been for unions to organize the South...
...The President's extraordinary success in Congress can best be explained in terms of the generally improved economic outlook, as well as in terms of his decision to make Government frugality a cardinal point of his current crusade...
...but the Soviet Premier and the rocket that his scientists firmly planted on the moon all but pushed the accounts of the final hectic hours of the 86th Congress up against the want ad sections of the newspapers...
...The President's program for spending more than $4 billion for foreign aid was cut back by almost one-fourth...
...Taft-Hartley was supposed to have put John L. Lewis in his place, and this year's legislation supposedly has given Jimmy Hoffa his comeuppance...
...Instead, the serious economic problems seemed almost to solve themselves...
...Nor did anyone dream last winter that a visit to the United States by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev would give the first session the incentive that Congress always seems to need to finish up what legislation it has in hand and get out of town...
...Hoffa is not likely to find that the 1959 labor bill has forced him off the road...
...And despite the hand-wringing over the question by cheap-money men in Congress, there is probably no realistic alternative to the President's request...
...But Congress did close up shop before Communism's top traveling salesman had an opportunity to show his wares of peaceful coexistence to a joint Senate-House session...
...When the overwhelmingly Democratic Congress came to Washington last January, many members were thinking that the nation would still have an economic hangover from the previous year's recession...
...The most interesting political aspect of the season was the emergence of President Eisenhower as a dominating influence on Capitol Hill...
...the House Republican leader...
...Like Taft-Hartlev itself, this year's labor bill tilts the collective bargaining scales a little more in favor of management...
...This curious session of Congress was even a lackadaisical gumshoe...
...The housing bill, which Congress finally shaped to the President's design after he vetoed two earlier construction efforts, amounted largely to a continuance of existing non-controversial programs...
...The $39-billion defense budget was almost exactly what the President had ordered...
...Sam Rayburn and their Democratic colleagues head for their last political roundup...
...The bill to raise the Federal gasoline tax by one cent a gallon provided for only two-thirds of the increase that Eisenhower felt was needed, but the legislation amounted to little more than a recognition of the rising cost of road-building...
...Yet the man on Capitol Hill who seems to have had the greatest influence over legislation this year is Representative Charles A. Halleck (R.-Ind...
...But he did demonstrate that the President can be a powerful leader, even if Congress is controlled by an opposition party in command of a heavy majority...
...In the past, the Senate had always restored much of the money denied to the program by a penurious and suspicious House...
...The measure moved through Congress on the momentum of outrage generated by the investigations of the McClellan Committee...
...One session does not make a Congress, of course, but the second session of the 86th Congress will be shot through with the Presidential election-year politics of 1960...
...The prolonged argument over an increase in the interest rates on Federal bonds was lost by the President...
...There are, of course, stubborn pockets of unemployment and economic distress...
...He certainly did not get any sympathy from the Senators...
...This year the Senate went along with most of the reductions made by the House...
...In the Senate the Democrats, with 65 members, have almost a two-thirds majority: there are 35 Republican Senators...
...Like the Taft-Hartley Act, too, the new bill was sold to many Congressmen in highly personal terms...
...The budget battle, which so many Democrats seemed to warm up to last January, ended in another decisive victory for Eisenhower...
...The Administration's foreign aid plans got the usual treatment from a Congress growing increasingly indifferent to both military and economic aid...
...In a way...
...Even the Senate failed to fight for an adequate foreign aid appropriation this year...
...This undoubtedly will mean that Social Security recipients will find their monthly benefits increased slightly some time before election day...
...Even in this one triumph Congress hardly looked like a winner...
...Indeed, the $68-billion budget which Congress finally approved was $700 million less than the President had requested, despite all the Democratic talk early in the session that the Eisenhower estimates were shockingly inadequate...
...The failure of Congress to pursue its investigatory powers was indicative of the lack of Congressional energy on Capitol Hill in this first session...
Vol. 42 • September 1959 • No. 35
