THE CONGRESS: Lumber Pile

A mighty pile of legislative lumber remained last week to be sawed by Congress before adjournment. But controversies between men at opposite ends of the saw grew hotter with the weather instead of abating.

Taxation was the one big subject on which all agreed. Three days after the House had passed its measure with but one dissenting vote, easing corporate income taxes and removing business "irritants" (TIME, June 26), the Senate passed the measure unanimously, shot it to the White House, leaving President Roosevelt one week in which to preserve the excise tax structure expiring June 30.

National Defense was also relatively uncontroversial. The House last week had up the last of the big rearmament appropriations, $292,695,547 for personnel, new airbases, etc., and to buy 2,290 more planes for the Army Air Corps. The Republicans managed momentarily to strike some $37,000,000 from the bill, on the ground that 1,283 of the proposed ships, intended for reserves, might be obsolete before commissioned. The Democrats rallied, voted the reserve planes back in, passed the whole bill on to the Senate. Striking feature : provision for giving Army pilots their first three months' training at commercial air schools, to relieve congestion at Randolph and Kelly Fields.

Money Bills. Extension beyond June 30 of the Treasury's $2,000,000,000 exchange stabilization fund, of its silver purchasing power, and of the President's power to devalue the dollar further, were all voted two months ago by the House. Old Senator Glass kept the bill deadlocked in his Banking and Currency subcommittee until the White House induced Senator Miller of Arkansas to change his vote. The bill then got out to the Senate floor, with Senator Glass swearing from his sickbed that he would fight to the end against monkeying with the currency.

He soon had allies of an opposite stripe —a band of eleven Senators led by Oklahoma's silver-haired Thomas and Nevada's roseate McCarran, who advanced an inflation plan calling for $2,000,000,000 of new paper currency to be backed by the Treasury's idle gold. Idaho's Borah and Nevada's Pittman joined them in demanding, further, that the price now paid for silver by the Treasury (64.64¢ per oz.) be raised much higher above the market price (40¾¢). For four long days last week they tied up other legislation while they "explained" their aims to the Senate and nation. Senator Pittman, an Administration man in most things, gave Secretary Morgenthau a ferocious wigging for not telling the President about the plight of 318,000 Westerners who (Pittman said), dependent on silver production & processing, were thrown out of work when the Treasury lowered its silver subsidy price from 77.57¢ per oz. to 64.64¢. Senator Pittman demanded $1.29 per oz., which he called "normal."

Senator Pittman's blackjack was potent. The harassed Senate compromised by voting back the 1937 silver price for domestic silver, barring further purchases of foreign silver (from China and Mexico). More surprising, it gave Senator Glass his victory, voted 47-to-31 to end the President's power to pare the dollar. But it gave new life to the stabilization fund, essential for U. S. participation in steadying foreign exchange with England and France.