THE CONGRESS: Sad Little Session

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The 86th Congress passed away whimpering. The short, post-convention summer session ordered by the Democratic leadership to make campaign hay turned into a Democratic fiasco. Bill after bill was either stopped dead or hacked to pieces by a disciplined coalition of Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats. Dick Nixon would not have to explain away any awkward presidential vetoes during his campaign, because President Eisenhower had not had to use his veto.* Although on adjourning Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson and House Speaker Sam Rayburn pointed with customary pride, they could not camouflage the failure.

Jack Kennedy, angry and frustrated by his inability to force through even one pet project, was left empty-handed and—far worse—derided by the Republicans for failure to rally the overwhelming Democratic majorities behind his program. In the last fitful week, two more of Kennedy's cherished bills—the minimum-wage extension and the school aid bill—went down the drain. Kennedy himself was head of the Senate delegation that went to a Senate-House conference committee trying to work out a compromise between his own version of the minimum-wage bill (boosting wages from $1 to $1.25 per hour, extending coverage to 4,000,000 jobholders) and the House bill ($1.15 minimum wage, extension to 1,400,000 workers). He faced an implacable coalition of conservatives. Their terms: the House bill or nothing. Rather than accept the scaled-down version and run the risk of a heavy lambasting from organized labor. Kennedy settled for nothing, let both bills die in conference.

Ducking a Dilemma. The school construction measure was landlocked in the House Rules Committee. Again Jack Kennedy faced a dismaying dilemma: the Senate version, appropriating nearly twice the money ($1.8 billion) offered by the House, authorized special federal funds to raise teachers' salaries—a mouth-watering campaign plum. The House bill contained nothing for the teachers, but it did have Adam Clayton Powell's familiar monkey wrench: an amendment restricting the construction money to integrated schools. With the promise of a vote, if necessary, from Arkansas' James Trimble, Kennedy's adherents on the Rules Committee had the strength to get the House bill out, if Kennedy gave the word.

But in the Senate, the Powell Amendment would have brought on a Southern filibuster. Had Kennedy labored to get the amendment dropped in conference committee, he would have antagonized Negro voters. Kennedy was content to see the bill die, passed the word to Trimble to do nothing. He thereby avoided needlessly antagonizing teachers, Negroes and Southerners.