WHO'S THE Boss?
Shelton, Willaxd
Who's the Boss? By Willard Shelton THREE MAJOR factors will determine the character and conduct of the 83rd Congress. The first is the extent to which Presidentelect Eisenhower desires or thinks...
...But it is not a stupid and immovable Cabinet...
...But presumably young Albert Gore of Tennessee would like to head a Senate committee some time...
...The liberals of the Party were left by the election, in Sen...
...IV "Friendliness" toward labor would be aimed at decreasing the emotional intensity of labor's tie with the Democratic Party, thus "proving" that even unions have nothing to fear from Republican power...
...Power, in that case, would truly gravitate to the Congressional Old Guardsmen, for Joe Martin and Sen...
...Irving Ives of New York—vote against Taft rather than with him on most labor issues...
...The Eisenhower Administration would thus try to intensify the farmer's emotional tie to the Republican Party by "proving" that agriculture loses nothing by a Republican victory...
...has watched Congress in action from his seat in the press gallery for more than a decade...
...Humphrey's phrase when we were discussing the problems last month, "more broken and dispersed than the British Army after Dunkerque...
...In the second place, sensible young Southerners may be expected to realize that they will never reach positions of national power themselves until the Democratic party wins another national election...
...The liberals, however, have more latent strength than they may have realized immediately...
...The liberals would be compelled to support Eisenhower's programs and the most reactionary Southern Democrats would gain discredit for opposing them...
...Any amendments Eisenhower requested to the Taft-Hartley Law would go through the committee, and Taft would face the instantaneously critical question of going along with his President or fighting him openly on the floor...
...They had no coherence or unity in their immediate plans—not even in the face of obvious Southern threats to complete the ruin of the New Deal by reasserting Southern conservative control of their Party...
...He would set himself hard against any reversal of foreign policy in either the military or economics fields...
...None of them will ever make the grade until the Democrats win nationally...
...Liberals in American political history are prone to be extreme individualists, unready to unite on a program and tending to split bitterly even with their friends on specific issues...
...Stevenson was not, so far as he was concerned, the head of the Democrats, and that policy would be made in the Senate under the leadership of Sen...
...The Democrats cannot carry the decisive Northern and Western states except on a liberal program...
...Certain types of payoffs to the Old Guard seem inevitable...
...They have believed in what they fought for in the past: they need unity in fighting on a new front under Eisenhower's different and wholly untried national leadership...
...So would Kefauver, so would George Smath-ers of Florida...
...It is a luxury they should not permit themselves beginning with the 83rd Congress...
...Wayne Morse of Oregon, who broke with Eisenhower and resigned from the Republican Party to campaign for Stevenson, is allowed to remain on the Committee, still another anti-Taft vote would be available...
...Ill A "smart" Eisenhower Administration, in the opinion of both Republican and Democratic liberals in Congress with whom I have talked in recent weeks, would operate in the following way: It would willingly pay its debts to the Old Guard by allowing the enactment of anti-consumer bills, by reducing the role of the federal government and enhancing the role of state governments in utility control, power projects, and management of public lands, and by opposing all new federal welfare experiments...
...But Democrats and farm-state Republicans would find 90 per cent guarantees difficult to oppose, and Eisenhower endorsed the idea in his Kasson (Minn...
...Taft are not men to let power lie around unused...
...Appropriations and the reciprocal trade pacts bill, therefore, will be among the Administration's first tests...
...Richard Russell...
...If Lyndon Johnson is to be Senate minority floor leader, why not a liberal for whip, the second-ranking Democratic position...
...Louis Star-Times, and PM...
...They should support the incoming President when they think he is right and oppose him, on principle, when they think he is wrong...
...But this is as far as it would go in appeasing the Old Guard...
...Isolationism, including the neo-isolationism that expresses itself through appropriations cuts, would be made as dead in the Republican Party as in the Democratic Party...
...It would promote the cause of "free enterprise" by freeing big business, especially, from the onerous necessity of defending itself against charges of violating the antitrust laws...
...With the patronage, the prestige of the Republicans' first winner in years, the powers and perquisites of the office of the Presidency, he planned to break down the defenses of the Old Guard and force it, willy-nilly, into the 20th Century...
...The third is the role of the Democrats, and particularly of the Northern and Western liberal Democrats...
...The second is the extent to which Eisenhower, rising above such debts, exercises the power voted into his hands by the people...
...That may not be important to George, who has twice been chairman of the Finance Committee and has no serious objection to seeing the chairmanship shift again to the Republican Millikin of Colorado...
...If the issues of the first six months of the new Congress are likely to be appropriations, taxes, and reciprocal trade—that is, if Eisenhower either surrenders to the Old Guard on these questions or takes forward-looking positions that alienate many in his own party—the liberal Democratic position should be strong and consistent...
...It would be of relatively little importance, if Eisenhower acts decisively, that Joe Martin is scheduled to be Speaker of the House, that the reactionary Jesse Wolcott of Michigan will head the House Banking and Currency Committee, and John (Meat-Ax) Taber of New York will run House Appropriations...
...Neither are they fools about the immediate threat to the Administration should there be even a ripple of spreading unemployment and weakness in farm prices accompanying sharp cuts in military expenditures and foreign aid...
...They were silent when Sen...
...campaign farm speech, thus repudiating the Republican platform's farm plank...
...They are of the type that is content to yield a little on certain issues in order to be sure of maintaining control on the major issues...
...The late Wendell L. Willkie once told me—in 1944—that if he could win the GOP nomination again and enter the White House he would "remake the Republican Party in his first term...
...It would gradually weaken the pro-consumer doctrines of the New Deal by diluting the membership of independent regulatory agencies...
...most were either mending their private political fences in their home states, licking their wounds, or eking out their incomes by lecture tours...
...It would be pro-business and pro-profits in an affirmative manner that has not been seen in Washington for twenty years...
...If Ike should follow a regressive policy—old-fashioned protectionism in the tariff field, drastic "economy" cuts in spending, a lack of attention to the special demands of great voting blocs such as the farmer, labor, and minority groups, the Democratic situation would be greatly eased...
...Many of the campaign promises of the victorious Republican nominee were self-contradictory...
...The liberal element needs certain things: a recognition by the South of its rights to representation in top Congressional councils...
...Every major anti-consumer bill successfully vetoed by President Truman in the last seven years will be reintroduced and passed—and in all probability signed by Eisenhower...
...can floor leadership and a seat on the Foreign Relations Committee...
...The Old Guardsmen might move reluctantly, "kicking and screaming" as Adlai Stevenson put it in the recent campaign, but Willkie believed they could be forced to move...
...Thus: • He has already specifically pledged himself to sign the kind of "quit-claim" bill giving control of the rich offshore oil lands to the states, that Truman twice vetoed...
...The tactics would be simple: let the President-elect promptly ask Congress for a broad expansion of social security, an amended wage-hour law raising minimum wages from 75 cents an hour to $1, bigger appropriations for the Department of Labor in administering the labor-protectionist Walsh-Healy and Bacon-Davis Acts, and amendments to the Taft-Hartley Law going beyond those Taft was willing to tolerate in 1947—or perhaps even now...
...Or if these positions are juggled in some other way...
...The first is the extent to which Presidentelect Eisenhower desires or thinks he is compelled to pay his debts to the Old Guard...
...The six Democrats on the new Committee will remain solidly anti-Taft, and among the seven Republicans at least two—Aiken and Sen...
...Burnet R. Maybank of South Carolina announced that Gov...
...It is drawn almost exclusively from the managerial class and corporation lawyers— "hard money" men and "sound" business executives who are nevertheless not total reactionaries but believe in the wisdom of moving with the times...
...Eisenhower is the key—for if Eisenhower senses the nature of the personal mandate he received from the electorate he can bring to bear enormous resources that even the embittered Old Guard would find it difficult to resist in the "honeymoon" stages of the Administration...
...Eisenhower, according to this theory, would abandon immediate plans to reduce taxes and appropriations sharply in the fields that count most—military spending and foreign aid...
...Some liberal Democrats remaining in Congress fall into this pattern of anarchistic approach...
...Why not additional positions on the Steering Committee, which assigns legislative committee posts, and on the Policy Committee, which works out party strategy and tactics...
...And at the same time the Eisenhower Administration would try to build a reputation of "friendliness" to farmers, "friendliness" to labor, perhaps even of "friendliness" to minority groups including the Negro...
...So if we can expect no expansion of the public housing program—and, indeed, may face almost an abandonment of the program already approved in basic law—Eisenhower and his Cabinet might force the Republican Party to face facts in the field of tariffs and world economic relationships...
...He cannot in the hard world of realistic facts cut the budget and taxes and still maintain high farm benefits, broaden the social security laws, strengthen the schools, and continue a major program of military rearmament and foreign aid...
...And Sen...
...The managerial gentlemen in the Cabinet are no fools in regard to government expenditures as a cause of "prosperity" and the desirability of foreign markets for American goods, whether supported by loans, outright gifts, or expanded capacity of other nations to earn dollars with which to buy our production...
...The Cabinet Eisenhower has gathered about makes it perfectly clear —if assurance were needed—that the Administration plans no significant experiments in social legislation...
...Robert A. Taft successfully asserted his claim to RepubliWILLARD SHELTON, a Washington crorespondent...
...Eugene Millikin of Colorado heads the tax-writing Finance Committee and the conservative Styles Bridges the Appropriations Committee...
...It would be even relatively unimportant if Sen...
...A very different situation would arise if Eisenhower should present no affirmative program but merely echo in his policies the 1950 Republican "Declaration of Principles" that he endorsed immediately after returning from Europe last spring...
...The Democrats won't win for many years if they think that Harry Byrd of Virginia and Walter George of Georgia are "leaders...
...It is at least worth noticing, in this regard, that Sen...
...There is no reason to suppose that he would not sign a revived basing point bill of the type Truman vetoed, thus spreading the mantle of government approval over monopolistic pricing practices now outlawed by the Federal Trade Commission and the Supreme Court...
...Here, again, liberal Democrats could not afford to oppose the Administration —and if Ike insists that the Old Guard Republicans follow his leadership, how could they break with him immediately after his shining personal Presidential victory...
...II What we don't know about Eisenhower is whether he knows that he must run the Old Guard or let it run him...
...George Aiken of Vermont, chairman-prospective of the Senate Agriculture Committee and father of the 1948 "sliding scale" farm law allowing government support prices to slip as low as 60 per cent of parity...
...But he can clarify his real program and declare his leadership in his first State of the Union message or in an early series of messages...
...Friendliness" to the farmer would mean 90 per cent government guarantees of parity prices and something new for the farmer whose cash income depends on now unprotected perishables—in short, something similar to the Brannan Plan...
...Such a dose might be unpleasant to Sen...
...In the first place, they were not really routed in the election: in the Senate they lost William Benton of Connecticut and Joseph O'Mahoney of Wyoming, but gained in the election of Henry Jackson in Washington, Mike Mansfield in Montana, and, perhaps, Stuart Symington in Missouri...
...If the new Administration is "smart," and skillfully appeases farmers, labor, and finally minority groups such as Negroes by really doing something in the field of civil rights legislation, the Democrats might be outflanked...
...A proper approach for Democratic liberals, furthermore, would be the organization of a caucus within the party to coordinate their program...
...The South cannot win an election alone, so the Northern and Western liberals are a party asset that cannot be ignored...
...Just before the 82nd Congress adjourned, Aiken's law was amended to provide 90 per cent parity guarantees for the next two years, and the amendment went through with unanimous approval of the House Agriculture Committee and without the serious objection of Republican Senators, any one of whom could have blocked action by simply threatening a filibuster...
...If Sen...
...So, perhaps, would even Price Daniel of Texas...
...William E. Jen-ner, for example, could scarcely accuse a Republican President of treasonous wastage of our resources if Eisenhower takes Cabinet advice and warns Congress that we cannot both raise tariffs suddenly and sharply slash military and economic aid to our allies in Western Europe...
...and if the corporation-minded Sen...
...It would gratify the conservatives by raising interest rates and managing the public debt in a "deflationary" way...
...There is no reason to suppose that the Republicans will not revive the Moore-Rizley bill of the 80th Congress, which went far beyond the Truman-vetoed Kerr bill of 1950 to assert legislatively the freedom of gas and other power producers from any meaningful regulation by the Federal Power Commission, nor is there anything in Eisenhower's campaign or the nature of his Cabinet to arouse the thought that such a bill would face a veto...
...Shelton has written for The Nation, The Reporter, The Rotarian, and The New Republic Earlier, he worked for a number of daily newspapers, including the Chicago Sun, the St...
...Taft in all probability will not be able to control his own Labor and Public Welfare Committee in the new Senate...
...The role of the Democrats in the 83rd Congress, particularly liberal Democrats, depends largely on the nature of Eisenhower's leadership...
...Certain types of payoffs to the Old Guard seem eventually inevitable, in the field of appropriations and taxes—but here is one place where Eisenhower might, at the beginning of his Administration, assert a quality of leadership that would force the Old Guardsmen to follow his direction rather than let them put a ring in his nose and lead him around after them...
...Few of them were in Washington...
...Scheduled to expire next spring, the trade pact program could be ruined if Old Guardsmen in Congress revive their "peril point" amendment from the 80th Congress and insert various restrictions and quotas on imports through "riders" on appropriations bills...
Vol. 17 • January 1953 • No. 1
