GOVERNMENT: Ambush

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President Eisenhower's plan for a non-partisan monetary commission to study the nation's overall financial system (TIME, Jan. 21) ran into a strictly partisan ambush in Congress last week. By a vote of 16 Democrats to twelve Republicans, the House Banking and Currency Committee, with full covering fire from Speaker Sam Rayburn, rejected the President's plea for permission to appoint nine U.S. financial leaders to lead the study, instead decided to do the job itself. The chairman of the investigating committee would undoubtedly be Democrat Wright Patman. Said Speaker Rayburn: "If there is going to be an investigation, Congress ought to do it."

With that, the House served notice that the Federal Reserve Board and its tight-money policy will probably find rough going in the 85th Congress, since Texan Patman is one of Capitol Hill's most outspoken critics of FRB's credit-pinching policies. In the Senate, the Administration can look for little help. A resolution by Indiana's Republican Senator Homer Capehart, authorizing a non-partisan presidential commission, is sleeping quietly in the Senate Banking and Currency Committee, has little chance of being reported out before the end of February, if then.

The only remaining hope for a non-partisan appraisal of the nation's financial structure rested last week with Democratic Senate Leader Lyndon Johnson. While Johnson is dead set against a strictly presidential commission because he fears that it might be dominated by big business and big banking, he is equally afraid that a House investigation alone might degenerate into bitter partisan battle. To break the impasse, Johnson is pushing for a compromise commission of his own, one-third of whose members would be named by President Eisenhower, with the other two-thirds divided between the House and Senate, somewhat along the lines of the Hoover Commission on Organ ization of the Executive Branch of the Government.