The Congress: Reaching into the Future

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...