Washington - U.S.A.
DUSCHA, JULIUS
WASHINGTON– U.S.A. By Julius Duscha Results Are Meager in Post-Convention Congress The results of the post-convention session of Congress are meager, politically as well as legislatively. If...
...As for the minimum-wage bill, it ran into the same reactionary forces in a House Conference committee that produced the Landrum-Griffin labor bill last year...
...likes to call "the medically needy" will soon fall of its own bureaucratic weight...
...During the closing days of the session the remark, "Why, the people back home don't even know Congress is in session," was frequently heard in the corridors and cloakrooms on Capitol Hill...
...They saw it as a hammer which could be held over the heads of Democrats at the Los Angeles convention in the drive to satisfy Johnson's Presidential aspirations...
...Whatever may be wrong with the pace of Congress, upcoming elections force it at least to move faster than the ever increasing and ever more cautious bureaucracy which so ponderously carries out its sometimes muddled wishes...
...Now, as the Democratic Vice Presidential nominee, the Majority Leader finds himself to some extent a victim of his own celebrated maneuvering...
...This same un-representative alliance of Southern Democrats and conservative Northern Republicans will of course be in control of the 87th Congress, which convenes next January—just as it has been in control of virtually every Congress for more than 20 years...
...For no one is really satisfied with a program which requires each state to act separately, which limits benefits to persons on relief or to others who are virtually destitute and which will bring few real benefits to many of the aged for months or perhaps even years...
...For although the 1960 session accomplished something ( while the 1948 one did nothing except opening up the Hiss case), the highly charged political atmosphere of such a session, coupled with the legislative jam at the end of any meeting of Congress, militates against constructive achievements...
...Ironically, anyone who knows the facts of Capitol Hill life could have forecast what finally happened...
...It is generally agreed in Washington that the politically expedient Federal-state medical assistance program which Congress approved for what millionaire Senator Robert Kerr (D-Okla...
...But the conservative Republican-Southern Democratic coalition which controls Congress, despite the 2-1 Democratic majorities, simply will not go along with any program that has been labeled "socialistic" by the powerful American Medical Association...
...True, a majority of Americans appear to favor an old age medical-care program linked to the Social Security System...
...This year was the first time since Harry Truman called his "turnip session" of Congress, following the 1948 Democratic convention, that Congress has met in the aftermath of a nominating convention...
...Walter Lippmann made this same point in discussing the narrow margin (four votes) by which the Social Security approach to medical care for the aged lost in the Senate...
...But, as Franklin D. Roosevelt demonstrated so often, White House leadership can take on this Congressional coalition and, more often than not, defeat it...
...If anyone benefited from the session, it was Vice President Nixon, and he did so merely by being able to remain aloof from the bickering and compromising on the Senate and House floors...
...Pressures from a President who supports the Social Security method, he noted, could easily produce the necessary handful of votes...
...As usual, the House Rules Committee, led by Dixiecrat Howard W. Smith of Virginia and Old Guard Republican Leo Allen of Illinois, even sat tight on such legislation as the anemic aid to education program and the hardly revolutionary expansion of the housing programs...
...Actually, it was conceived by Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, and his mentor, House Speaker Sam Rayburn...
...Many realistic Democrats are convinced that, in the words of one liberal Democratic Senator from the Midwest, "This session sure isn't helping Jack...
...And it is probably the last time that it will do so for a long time to come, barring national emergencies...
...But now Congress has left Washington to the tourists and to the bureaucrats whose in and out boxes seem to stay filled regardless of who is in town or what party is in power...
...The more optimistic Democratic liberals here apparently hope that memories of the August session will be drowned in the flood of campaign oratory promised by both Presidential candidates...
...That may be, but the Capitol has been flooded with sightseers, most of whom were hoping for a glimpse of the nominees...
...Senator John Kennedy enhanced his standing with the working people by winning Senate approval for his expanded-coverage, $1.25-per hour minimum-wage bill, but his inability to rally Southern Democratic support for a Social Security-supported old age medical care program did not help his reputation for leadership...
...Within two or three years, the feeling is, the program will be brought under the Social Security System...
Vol. 43 • September 1960 • No. 34
