THE CONGRESS: Panic & Payola

With civil rights out of the way. Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress trained their verbal artillery on one another in readiness for a partisan election-year battle. Republicans rallied around President Eisenhower's black-ink budget; Democrats pushed forward under the banner of welfare legislation.

When word reached Capitol Hill that the President was readying a special message urging Congress to hold down on spending, Democrats fired away. Republicans were "grabbing everywhere for an issue," growled House Speaker Sam Rayburn. It is "saddening," said Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson, "that there are those who feel that they must take to the air waves because Congress is trying to work out some programs that will help people that need help. That is a peculiar motivation for panic." Congress, he rumbled, was not going to rubber-stamp "a program laid down by another branch of government.''

Republicans got in a few volleys, too. Said Illinois' Senate Minority Leader Everett M. Dirksen, when asked to comment on Lyndon Johnson's "panic" remark: "I am so far from panicky that it's not even funny. Never was I more complacent. Never was I more confident — strike out that word 'complacent.' " House Minority Leader Charles A. Halleck denounced the House's $251 million depressed-areas bill as "political payola," and its housing bill as "a billion dollars' worth of baloneyola." Neither bill "can become law," said Halleck, "because if we can't beat them, we certainly can muster enough votes to sustain a veto."

Next day the House passed the bill that Halleck had called "baloneyola": an "emergency" housing measure authorizing federal purchases of $1 billion in mortgages on new houses costing $13,500 or less. But Dirksen, Halleck & Co. still had reason to be confident, if not complacent.

The vote on the housing bill was 214 (201 Democrats, 13 Republicans) to 163 (123 Republicans, 40 Democrats, mostly Southerners) — and 163 votes are more than enough to sustain the inevitable Eisenhower veto.