THE CONGRESS: Work of the Week

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> Having dug Economy's grave with the Farm Bill (TIME, May 22), the Senate last week shoveled earth on the corpse. From the House's supply bill for civil functions of the War Department ($305,188,154), the Senate Appropriations Committee manfully chopped $25,000,000 of rivers & harbors pork, $25,000,000 of flood control works. On the Senate floor, restlessness to restore these items impelled Majority Leader Barkley to promise that, if Senators would let the savings stand, the President would spend equivalent sums on these projects from Relief moneys. Avoiding a record vote, the Senators assured themselves of credit with the home folks, voted the $50,000,000 back in.

> By substituting annually declining export quotas for annually rising tariffs on major Philippine products with the exception of sugar (coconut oil, tobaccos, pearl & shell buttons), the Senate voted to save these island industries from extinction at least until the Independence year of 1946. As an original sponsor of Philippine Independence, Maryland's unpurged Millard Tydings had talked it over with Franklin Roosevelt, agreed with him that the islands could not stand too sudden a shift from free trade with the U. S.

> As a leading nominee for Führer & Savior of the U. S., the Army's retired Major General George Van Horn Moseley last week damned Jews, Reds and the Dies Committee on Un-American Activities whose guest he was. Witness Moseley set a record high for testamentary effrontery. His henchman, Charles B. Hudson of Omaha, set a high for panic by snatching away the General's water glass, lest it be poisoned (see cut). Otherwise General Moseley only rehashed and amplified his earlier, alarmistic mouthings (TIME, April 10), implied that the U. S. Army would be quelling "the enemy within our gates" right now if Franklin Roosevelt would let it do its duty.

> Another witness-of-the-week was Dr. Francis Everett ("Plan") Townsend. who watched grimly from the gallery while the House voted down, 302-to-97, his bill to pay all 60-year-oldsters Federal pensions of $50-60 per month, financed by sales taxes to produce $4-6,000,000,000 piled on top of all other U. S. taxes. Chairman Doughton of the Ways & Means Committee delivered the official excoriation, using the following adjectives: unequal, unjust, unsound, fanatical, intolerable, inequitable, cockeyed, crackpot. Dr. Townsend's solace: three years ago the House had him sentenced for contempt (Franklin Roosevelt pardoned him) ; now his planacea put members on a piping political pan. Bob Doughton & Co. hastened next day to vote, in Committee, to recommend raising from $15 to $20 the maximum monthly handout by the Treasury to oldsters whose States pension them.