THE CONGRESS: Arrivals

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Although the 69th Congress does not reconvene for its last and short winter session until Dec. 6, yet Washington is already liberally sprinkled with ambitious lawmakers, framing and log-rolling new bills.

Perhaps the busiest of them all is Representative Martin B. Madden of Illinois, Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. After a conference with President Coolidge last week, he announced that he would have the appropriation bills for the Treasury, Postal and Agriculture Departments ready on the opening day of Congress. Other supply bills will follow a few days later, so that Congress can clean up its necessary routine before Christmas recess and then plunge into controversial measures. Representative Madden was emphatic in denying any slashing of Army and Navy budgets. Said he: "I have seen a lot in the papers that we would try to squeeze the flesh away from the bone. There is no intention of doing that. . . . We have spent more than any country in the world on aviation. If we haven't got the best aviation in the world we haven't got the best management." The House Ways and Means Committee assembled, began to hear arguments on tax reduction plans and alien property settlement. Representative John N.

("Jack") Garner of Texas, ranking minority member of the committee, arrived wearing a new two-gallon sombrero. Later he called informally on Secretary of the Treasury Mellon and they debated the merits of the Democratic and Republican tax cutting schemes

(TIME, Nov. 22). Said Representative Garner on emerging from the Treasury Building: "Well, I tried to convince the Secretary how impossible his position was, and he told me how foolish I was. Neither was convinced."

Senator Hiram W. Johnson, on from California, strode into the Senate office building; prowled proudly around the gymnasium; inspected horizontal bars, electric horses, punching bags, medicine balls; decided that all was in order for the reorganization of his Senatorial gym class of 40.

Meanwhile, alert lawmakers, who keep little notebooks, began to list the questions which Congress ought to solve within the next year. A peek into such a notebook revealed the following entries: Prohibition enforcement legislation which General Lincoln C. Andrews is demanding, McFadden-Pepper Branch Banking bill, radio regulation bill, alien property settlement, Muscle Shoals leasing or sale, railroad consolidation, government shipping business, national waterways and the Great Lakes dispute (TIME, Nov. 22), action on Col. Carmi A. Thompson's report on the Philippines (see p. 8), Lausanne Treaty, ratification or rejection of the Berenger-Mellon French debt pact, farm relief, World Court (an issue which is now fast fading), use of the Treasury surplus for income tax reduction.

Obviously, few of these problems can be solved in the short winter session of the 69th Congress, called by many a lame duck session. The 70th Congress, with a fresh mandate from the people, is theoretically better qualified to act. But the 70th Congress will not convene until December, 1927, unless President Coolidge calls a special session. He will not do so unless coerced.