The Prelude of the 83rd

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Chief Carpenter. Across the way in the House of Representatives, the pattern was similar. Bald, old (71 this week) Sam Rayburn, who served longer as Speaker (3,760 days) than any man in history, had stepped down to minority leader with a characteristic line. Said he: "Time will tell, if they [the Republicans] can really run the Government. Any jackass can kick a barn door down, but it takes a carpenter to build it back." The Republicans' chief carpenter in the House, Massachusetts' Joe Martin, Speaker in the 80th Congress and Sam Rayburn's good friend, ran things with a firm gavel. Ready to help him as majority leader on the floor, as he had in the 80th Congress, was Indiana's Charles Halleck. When a comparatively small (58) group of representatives tried to strip the Rules Committee of its power to pigeonhole bills, Martin needed no help to bang through a voice vote shouting them down. It is the new leadership's responsibility, said the Speaker, to see that desirable legislation is not bottled up.

While Joe Martin demonstrated that he was in charge on his side of the rotunda just as Bob Taft was on the other side, members of the House dropped more than 1,000 bills into the hopper. Among them: one from New York's Republican Representative Daniel Alden Reed, who will be chairman of the tax-writing Ways & Means Committee, to cut individual income taxes an average of 11% next June 30. Speaker Martin gave it a possibly significant designation: H.R. No. 1.