THE CONGRESS: Hidden Shoals

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Anxious to get out to Chicago and the serious business of politicking, the nation's lawmakers chopped away furiously last week at the jungle of neglected legislation which had to be dealt with before the 82nd Congress could adjourn for the last time. Night after night, a small light under the statue on the Capitol dome burned brightly, indicating that Congress was at work. In the House chamber, weary Speaker Sam Rayburn, pausing only to spit with experienced accuracy into his goboon, cleared hundreds of routine bills with incessant repetition of the magic words:' "Without objection, so ordered."

Bills of major importance passed with little more discussion. In five days' time, the Congress completed action on:

¶The peace contract between the Bonn Republic and the Western allies.

¶A treaty protocol to bring West Germany into NATO.

¶A G.I. Bill of Rights, giving men who have served in the armed forces since the beginning of the Korean war roughly the same privileges previously accorded to World War II veterans.

¶A $46.6 billion military appropriations bill

The drive for adjournment hit hidden shoals, however, when the $10 billion supplemental appropriations bill came out of a House-Senate conference still carrying a House rider which would cut atomic-energy funds in half and seriously restrict construction of new atomic installations. Rising to the attack, Iowa's Republican Senator Bourke Hickenlooper, in a surprising burst of stirring and statesmanlike oratory, warned that the rider would blunt the U.S. atomic-energy program at a critical stage. Passionately, he demanded that the bill be sent back to conference for another try at removal of the rider.

To Hickenlooper's side rallied Democratic allies: Minnesota's Hubert Humphrey, Illinois' Paul Douglas, Majority Leader Ernest McFarland of Arizona. In an attempt to save the day for the Senate's let's-get-out-of-Washington faction, Tennessee's Kenneth McKellar got to his tired old feet. McKellar swore that the House would never abandon the rider, and that, anyway, the bill wasn't such a bad one. But after McKellar had slumped back into his chair, Hickenlooper and his supporters won the day. At dawn, in a turbulent voice vote, the Senate sent the bill back to conference. This week the conference reached a compromise on the atomic energy appropriation, and the 82nd Congress adjourned.