THE CONGRESS: Maiming Amendment

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On the need for some kind of federal aid to education, most members of Congress are pretty well agreed. The crowded classrooms, decaying school buildings and swarming moppets, products of the postwar baby boom, are too inescapably evident to be ignored. The Senate passed a hefty education bill in February, and last week, at the urging of Vice President Nixon, the Administration moved toward acceptance of a Democratic-type education program, despite President Eisenhower's distaste for direct federal subsidies.

But when the House education bill (calling for $1.3 billion over four years) came up for debate at midweek, the House put on a messy display of cross-purposed confusion. Amendments and proposals that would kill or maim the bill popped up and down like ducks at a sideshow shooting gallery. The Congressman whose proposal did the most harm was New York Democrat Adam Clayton Powell Jr., political boss of Harlem. He insisted on attaching the old familiar "Powell Amendment," a rider that would withhold federal funds from segregated schools. Powell occasionally manages to tack on his nuisance amendment, sometimes killing a decent bill because Southerners balk. In a bipartisan attempt to save school aid, the Administration offered House Democratic leaders a substitute measure similar to the Democratic bill. They agreed to the substitution, and if the maneuver had worked, it would have neatly sidestepped the Powell Amendment. But Indiana's House Minority Leader Charles Halleck, determined foe of federal school aid, torpedoed the plan with a firm count-me-out. The Democratic bill passed with the Powell Amendment attached, and Senate Southerners loosed the predictable howls. Alabama's Lister Hill, chairman of the Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee, vowed "unalterable and unequivocal" rejection of any measure that included the Powell Amendment.