CAPITAL NOTES: Fears & Frustrations

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¶ Hammered out last week at President Eisenhower's weekly White House meeting with congressional leaders: Republican strategy in upcoming Capitol Hill maneuvers over an anti-racketeering labor bill. At Ike's urging, the G.O.P. will go all the way for a moderately tough Administration labor bill that would ban secondary boycotts and blackmail picketing. In the Senate Labor Committee, and then, if necessary, on the floor, Senate Republicans will attempt to substitute the Administration package for a milder bill introduced by Massachusetts Democrat Jack Kennedy. Since the House Labor Committee is distinctly unfriendly to Ike's bill, Minority Leader Charles Halleck will wait, make his fight on the House floor. Halleck estimates he has votes enough there "to write a good bill."

¶ Many a Senate Republican has special misgivings about prospects for the Administration's labor bill. Reason: Arizona's open-shop advocate, Barry Goldwater, because of his seniority on the Labor Committee, will be the G.O.P.'s ranking Senate spokesman. Moderate Republicans fear that their program will get an automatic setback under Goldwater's wing; most recollect powerfully his fondness for the right-to-work laws that lost in five out of six states last fall and carried many a Republican down with them.† If Goldwater, who won easily in Arizona, right-to-work and all, takes an uncompromising stand during the labor bill debates, liberal Republicans may desert him not so much to affect Senate voting as to remind labor before 1960 that the G.O.P. has a friendly profile too.

¶When headlines blossomed with the story that Freshman Congressman Steven V. Carter's public relations assistant was1) his son, 2) 19 years old, 3) getting paid $11,872.26 a year, 4) splicing public relations into a pre-law course at George Washington University (TIME, March 2), Democrat Carter was unconcerned. Said he: "The folks back home in Iowa will understand." Last week enough mail had flooded Carter's Washington office to make it clear that folks back home did not understand at all. As a consequence, Carter made his maiden House speech, apologized if he had cast reflections on Congress, announced son Steven was taking a pay cut to $6,402. Publicly the House applauded; privately its members were hopping mad. So much bad publicity had been churned up by the Carters that a pending proposal to provide Congressmen with $14,000-a-year administrative assistants was in trouble.

¶ Democrats suspect that theAdministration is trying to ensure a close-to-balanced budget in fiscal 1960 by crowding as many projects as possible into the big deficit (estimated $13 million) for fiscal 1959. Most recent example: the request for a supplemental appropriation to provide $1,375,000,000 as an additional U.S. contribution to the International Monetary Fund and World Bank—an item, say the Democrats, that would normally have been budgeted in fiscal 1960.