The Congress: Diet of Worms

For months, with all the rhetorical flourishes at his command, Everett Dirksen had trumpeted his implacable opposition to the Administration's 1966 civil rights bill. Even so, when Dirksen was ushered into the President's oval office last week, Lyndon Johnson clapped a hand on his shoulder and said plaintively: "Ev, I thought you were in my corner." "Mr. President," replied the Senate minority leader, "how long has it been since I told you that I wasn't in your corner?" Then Johnson asked: "Is the door absolutely closed?" Dirksen: "Absolutely." Next year too? "If you send up another can of worms like that," said Ev, "next year too."

With this exchange, the bill was clearly doomed. Against a backdrop of Negro-incited violence in the cities, the public showed little enthusiasm for new ventures into civil rights—and outright antipathy to the bill's open-housing section. What is disturbing the nation, in Dirksen's phrase, is "conduct, not color." Indeed, the Administration itself had lobbied only halfheartedly for the measure. As a result, its Senate supporters failed last week by ten votes to get the two-thirds majority needed to stop a filibuster against it by imposing cloture. In a last, hopeless attempt to resuscitate the bill, Majority Leader Mike Mansfield scheduled yet another cloture vote for this week, and the filibuster droned on.

Irked not only by the civil rights talkathon but also by delaying action in congressional committees on eight major appropriations bills, Senators eager to return home for campaigning grew increasingly restive. Lyndon Johnson had, after all, predicted last year that the session would end before July. By week's end, however, the log jam began to ease as budget requests for the District of Columbia and for new military construction passed the House and another for public works emerged from a House committee.

In other actions, the Congress: — Passed, in the Senate, and sent to the President a bill raising the minimum wage for some 30 million workers to $1.40 an hour next February and to $1.60 a year later. Product of long wrangling between Government and organized labor, the bill also extends coverage to some 8,000,000 more employees, notably migratory farm workers. >Slashed, in the House Appropriations Committee, $295 million from the $3.38 billion foreign aid bill requested by the President. In the bill reported out of committee, $200 million was cut from economic aid requests and $95 million from military assistance. — Prepared, in the House Ways and Means Committee, a bill aimed at easing the credit squeeze by suspending the 7% tax credit allowed for corporate investment (see U.S. BUSINESS).