Battle of the Branches

...But if he decides that he is emperor instead of President and [tries] to move without consultation, to bypass the constitutional processes and the traditional processes of government, he will have a first-class donnybrook fight which will help neither the President nor the Congress nor the public...

...The public, in separate little groups in their districts and states, all want their hospitals and highways...

...Hubert Humphrey, who would like to succeed Mansfield some day as majority leader, laid down the Democratic line not long ago: "I want to suggest to a man who is President of the United States and who served both in the House and in the Senate that he can get a lot out of this Congress if he will work with us...

...Should a hostile Congress insist on approving such programs anyway As, given the lawmakers' constituency, it undoubtedly willhe will veto the appropriations and, as a last resort, simply refuse to spend the money...

...Lippmann's axiom then was that we as a nation faced grave dangers because a dynamic young President was being thwarted at every turn by the barons on Capitol Hillcommittee chairmen who could not be dislodged from power even though their views ran counter to the popular will...

...That is why in his second term the President will try to scale down Federal outlays in this sector as far as he possibly can...

...In another time, when Lyndon Johnson was serving as the Senate Democratic leader, the notion of such a plea to the courts by legislators would have been repugnant...

...BATTLE OF THE BRANCHES BY ANDREW J. GLASS Washington The political gulf separating President Nixon from the Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill follows a classic tradition that has been with us in one form or another since the founding of the Republic, and that both sides have managed to survive...

...Do we check inflation or not?As the President proposes, then I think two-thirds of the public would be on his side...

...Indeed, what Nixon may yet fail to realize is that the Democrats' strongest rallying point in the confrontation now brewing is his own insensitivity to their way of doing business and to their ultimate political needs...

...Of course, the late John Fitzgerald Kennedy did whatever he could to foster that argument, just as members of Congress today faithfully buttress Donovan's equally dire, if somewhat contrary, contentions...

...The irony, in fact, is that Mansfield and Albert got where they are largely as the result of a rebellion against the tight-fisted leadership that characterized the Johnson-Rayburn period...

...According to Editor-in-Chief Hed-ley Donovan, the issue is "whether a democratic society puts some value on collective wisdom as opposed to centralized individual wisdom, and whether the Congress can make a more constructive contribution to public policy...

...In this vein, one of his more astute assistants recently told Dom Bonafede of National Journal that although a test of wills over spending between the White House and Congress "could pull the legislators together," it would be dangerous for them: "They would be running against the grain of a clear majority of the public...

...When asked about the Humphrey statement, some White House staff members said it was directed less at them than at internal Senate politics...

...Their present successors, Majority Leader Mike Mansfield of Montana and House Speaker Carl Albert of Oklahoma, are men cut from a wholly different cloth...

...A good number of them, however, are convinced that if Nixon gets his way with the highway money, he will jolly well try to get his way on everything else, no matter what Congress does and thinks...

...Nixon expects to win, not because of some newly discovered Presidential powers, but because he thinks the majority of taxpayers will flock to bis side...

...Most senior Democrats are not convinced that every dollar in the Highway Trust Fund should be expended without delay to build new roads...

...So it usually paid for the President to take careful note of their wishes...

...By thoroughly alienating his Congressional opponents, he has managed to unite them where others before him have failed...

...The prevailing mood was reflected in a January Time cover story titled "Crisis in Congress...

...Johnson and his mentor in the House, Sam Rayburn, possessed sufficient clout to obtain nearly all they ever wanted from the Republican President of the day, Dwight Eisenhower...

...In the Nixon equation, Congress is a profligate and wasteful spender, whereas he attempts to guard the Federal treasury and protect a grateful citizenry against the potential ravages of a disastrous inflationary spiral...

...Even when Ike proved reluctant to go along with his Democratic friends on Capitol Hill, the two Texans could usually find a way to persuade him...

...For this reason, the Senate leadership took the unusual step in January of signing an amicus curiae brief on behalf of the Missouri Highway Department, which, along with 49 states, has had a large chunk of its Federal largesse impounded by the Nixon Administration...

...Thus it is interesting to note how many Washington correspondents, as well as the people they rely on for information, are betting that Congress will lose the battle shaping up for the current session...

...Unless some means were found to break the barons, Lipp-mann warned, the country was in for a bad time...

...Needless to say, these facts are not being paraded by the White House or the Office of Management and Budget (OMB...

...In turn, Nixon has been more relentless in impounding appropriations he did not ask for than any previous Chief Executive...

...If so, Humphrey is surely trying to impress his views on the wrong people, for nearly all of his Senate Democratic colleagues feel the same way he does...

...At the moment, the OMB sits on more than $12 billion in such funds, including $6 billion that Congress voted to clean up the nation's waters and $2 billion more for highway construction...

...Rather, what he wants to do is bypass both Congress and the Federal bureaucracy (which has a sweatheart contract with Congress) by doling out the money directly to the states, counties and citieswith a minimum number of strings attached to its utilization...

...Not only does the Administration naturally subscribe to this view, but a surprisingly large number of legislators privately anticipate defeat too...

...In the course of acting on the last three Nixon budgets, Congress actually voted $10.1 billion less than the amounts sought by the President...

...Virtually all of the Senate's committee chairmen signed the brief...

...Now that China has been restored to its good graces with full-color spreads and the once-horrifying missile gap is salt-free, Time apparently sees "Congress and its decline" as the pending matter of gravest concern...

...In the end, perhaps the only group to benefit from the conflict will be those historians whose everlasting business it is to trace what happens when men of strong conviction but little compassion for their adversaries seek to follow opposing courses of action...

...That is how, for example, the National Space and Aeronautics Administration was born in the late 1950s...

...This does not mean, as some liberal Democrats would have it, that Nixon callously believes public funds should be withheld from patently worthy causes, like education, health and fighting crime, or even (in his view) patently less worthy causes, like welfare...

...And he has always tried to justify these impoundments not by attacking the specific appropriationfor that would alienate votersbut on the grounds of prudent fiscal management...

...In this way, the President hopes to forge a firm bilateral axis between the centralized power in the White House and the diffused power of the nation's state houses and town halls...

...But Johnson and Rayburn controlled a lot of votes, and not merely Democratic ones either...

...it twice cut his budget by over $2 billion, and in fiscal 1973 it pared off more than $5 billion...

...Do we have higher interest rates or lower...

...Only a decade ago another distinguished observer, Walter Lipp-mann, was effectively working the opposite side of the street...

...And it could be that the present "constitutional crisis" is as much of an overblown distortion as the one we kept hearing about in the early 1960s...

...So the stage is being set for a confrontation over the Congressional power to spend as the lawmakers see fit, a right that, inconveniently for Nixon's designs, the Constitution in 1789 reserved to the Congress...

...But when you make that into a composite issue do we spend $280 billion or $250 billion...

...The fallacy in this is that the real battle has been and will continue to be over priorities and not spending per se...

...The nub of the matter, from which all else flows, is that Richard Nixon deeply objects to social programs of the kind the Democrats have served up for the past 40 years...