The Congress: Reaching into the Future

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After two of the longest, most grueling sessions in memory, the 89th Congress feverishly wound up its business last week and adjourned. With its final key measure, appropriating $5 billion for various Great Society programs—the 50th major bill adopted in the current session—Congress had in 1966 alone approved legislation that ranged from an anti-jellyfish measure to a new antipoverty law, and authorized expenditures of some $144.6 billion, second only to the $147 billion that it appropriated for a world war in 1942.

The 89th was the first Congress to address itself—in its legislative thrust as well as its membership—to the U.S. as a nation of city dwellers. Largely concerned with "the real dynamics of urban life," in President Johnson's phrase, it marched against the problems of slum housing, overcrowded streets, underemployed minorities, inadequate schools, polluted air and water, rising crime, complicated tax structures and shrinking recreational facilities. And it produced its prodigious array of social and economic legislation in spite of the tension and upheaval caused by a costly war. Indeed, the 89th went further than any other in modern times to exorcise the once-fashionable lament that Congress has become hopelessly incapable of tackling 20th century problems.

Most Democratic members of the overwhelmingly Democratic 89th (294 to 139 Republicans in the House, 67 to 33 in the Senate) viewed these accomplishments with understandable partisan pride. Rhapsodized House Speaker John McCormack: "This is the Congress of fulfillment, the Congress of our accomplished hopes, the Congress of our realized dreams. The Democratic Party has again found political and social immortality." More matter-of-factly, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield observed last week: "Both the quality and the quantity of legislation were good. Of course, a great deal of it simply came to a head; previous Congresses deserve credit for getting ready much of what we passed this year and in 1965. In some areas, we have gone too far."

Far & Frenetic. Clearly, the 89th would have done greater justice to its own record if it had been allowed time in 1966 to review and refine the titanic body of legislation that it had mass-produced in 1965. Yet, despite the President's promise last fall that the Congress would have little else to do this year, the Administration handed Capitol Hill a formidable new workload at the very start of the session.

In consequence, many of the hastily framed Great Society programs, however admirable, have not been carefully restudied in terms of cost, maximum efficacy and relevance to the nation's needs. Many state and city officials complain that such badly needed federal programs as the war on poverty and new educational ventures sometimes take too little account of local conditions. Federal specifications for the management of some antipoverty programs, for example, are the same in generally prosperous rural areas as in city ghettos; New York, with the highest number of addicts in the nation, gets no more dollar aid for the war on narcotics than Montana, which has almost no such problem.