THE CONGRESS: The Crack in the Constitution

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Ribicoff, among others, makes a persuasive proposal: Congress should have its own budget bureau to keep up with the overall spending totals, as well as to analyze specific funding needs and set up general priorities. Tennessee's Brock, a conservative who helped organize the Nixon re-election campaign among youth, has introduced a bill to set up a joint House-Senate committee that would propose a legislative budget, apart from the Administration's request, and create its own priorities. The joint committee, moreover, would periodically review the programs it has funded to see if they are working as intended. But Scholar Ralph Huitt worries that such a centralized committee would be easier for a President to control, and that "these people elected by no national group would have no responsibility to anybody."

IMPOUNDING. There is no more direct challenge to congressional power than Nixon's refusal to spend money Congress has appropriated. This issue apparently is headed for a momentous collision in the courts. Presidents have refused to spend funds in the past as far back as Thomas Jefferson, who withheld some $50,000 that had been authorized for gunboats to patrol the Mississippi River. But this was generally done then because the need had passed or a project cost less than had been expected. Nixon has used this device as an expanded veto power, impounding some $6 billion in water-pollution control money and $5 billion in highway funds. Moreover, he asked Congress for the right to select which appropriations he could reject, in an effort to keep spending within $250 billion this fiscal year and the House meekly agreed. Mathias claims the House did so because it saw the matter "as a mere housekeeping item," while Ribicoff termed the Senate's rejection of this request "its most significant action in modern times." Approval would have given the President unprecedented authority to thwart congressional will.

PRIORITIES. Congress has fallen into the habit of mainly reacting to the President's legislative requests, rather than setting its own agenda. Huitt argues that Congress simply does not have the machinery to do so now. Ervin distrusts any effort to change that, contending that Congress is too disparate a body, and each member would have his own priority preferences. "I would set a priority on moonshine liquor," he quips, "because a lot of my constituents still make it up in the hills." As Mansfield and Albert indicated last week, current attempts to set legislative priorities are taking place within the caucuses of the controlling Democratic Party.

STAFFS. Congressional committees, as well as most legislators, have inadequate staffs to compete with the Administration and what some consider a fourth branch of Government: the huge bureaucracy that nei ther the President nor Congress can control. Despite a 1946 law requiring all committees to hire only professional staff experts, many still use political pals or unskilled generalists. Minnesota's Democratic Senator Walter Mondale noted that when he held a hearing to argue against more aircraft carriers, it was a case of "myself and one college kid versus the U.S. Navy and everybody who wanted to build a carrier, or who had a friend who was an ensign or above. We foolishly handicap ourselves by failing to properly staff ourselves."