Nation: Congress: The Session in Between

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IT was like a train station at summer's end. There were the happy arrivals, trying to find a place to put their things. There were departures, some of them happy, some sad, some uncertain. There were comrades reunited. There was one man who arrived early, and there was one who refused to believe that he had to leave at all.

The occasion was the first full lame-duck session of Congress in 20 years, a meeting that will last until just before Christmas or, in Senate Republican Leader Hugh Scott's wry prophecy, until "we reach the end of our mutual patience with each other." Before the week was out, considerable attrition of that patience had already taken place. In a vote that crossed party lines and had an indecipherable mixture of political and philosophical motives, the Senate Finance Committee voted 10 to 6 to reject President Nixon's Family Assistance Plan. The proposal, which would change the underlying philosophy of public assistance and is the Administration's most innovative step in the area of social legislation, aims at the ultimate reduction of welfare rolls by providing a guaranteed minimum income for the poor —including the working poor—and job training for the unemployed.

A central figure in the committee vote was Senator Fred Harris of Oklahoma, a very dark-horse Democratic aspirant for a 1972 presidential nomination. Harris, after steadfastly supporting the measure for months, voted against it. A Health, Education and Welfare Department official saw pure politics in Harris' switch, calling him that "goddamned bastard" who "just couldn't stand the idea of Richard Nixon getting credit for this bill." Liberal Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the White House Counsellor who sold the President on the legislation, was even more bitter about Harris' role. He said: "Two long years, only to have it killed by a man who should be for it more than anybody. Now the kids will go on eating bugs, and the liberals will keep talking abeut how bad everything is. It's a real tragedy; we were so close." Moynihan also warned that if the welfare-reform bill fails this year, it will not become law for ten years. Certainly the chances of reviving it at this session are slim. It could come to the floor next year—perhaps under Democratic sponsorship.

Harris, in reply to his critics, charged that the President had continually altered the bill until "it's not a reform bill, it's regressive." Some originally liberal provisions had indeed been weakened in an effort to win conservative support. The latest version, for instance, disqualifies 450,000 unemployed fathers now eligible for benefits.

Other issues caused far less recrimination. The House passed a trade bill calling for more protectionism than the President sought; it may die in the Senate or be vetoed. Congress sent to Nixon an Administration farm bill, opposed by many farm-state Senators, which for the first time would limit subsidy payments to $55,000 a year to any individual farm for each of three basic crops: cotton, wheat and feed grains.