National Affairs: H. R. 17054

Soldier Bonus legislation began moving rapidly through Congress last week toward what was generally expected to be a presidential veto. Reported from the Ways & Means Committee H. R. 17054 to up veterans' loans on adjusted service certificates was snapped (363-to-37) through the House in 40 minutes. The Senate was primed for action no less quick to avert what all Bonus advocates dreaded—a pocket veto.

If President Hoover gets the measure before the last ten days of the session, he must either disapprove it and thereby allow Congress a chance to repass it over his veto or permit it to become a law automatically. If the measure reaches the White House after the last ten days period, the President can kill it by doing nothing to it (i.e a pocket veto) and thus deprive Congress of a second vote before final adjournment. With the ten-day period beginning Feb. 21, the Bonus fight became chiefly a race against time to the White House.

From the veterans' viewpoint the particular hero of last week's Bonus activities was New Jersey's Republican Representative Isaac ("Ike") Bacharach. In 1915 Mr. Bacharach went to Congress from Atlantic City. With his father he had prospered in the retail clothing trade, gone into real estate, lumber and banking when Atlantic City began booming as a resort, became a local tycoon. Seniority of service advanced him to the No. 3 majority place on the House Ways & Means Committee. There his dexterous management of politics and finance won him a reputation as the committee's "brain." A mixer and a fixer, sporty in attire, facially ferocious but personally pleasant, grey-bristly-haired Representative Bacharach is one of Speaker Longworth's closest friends and, as such, a power in House affairs.

Democrat Owen D. Young's testimony on the Bonus fortnight ago convinced Congressman Bacharach that it was politically necessary for the Republicans to act. Adopting the "Young Plan" of increased loans but rejecting the proposal to limit them only to needy veterans, he drafted H. R. 17054, got it by the Ways & Means Committee (17-to-4) to the House floor where Speaker Longworth helped him to pass it by a suspension of the Rules.

The Bacharach bill provided for: 1) upping the loan value of bonus certificates from 22½% t0,50%; 2) reducing the interest rates from 6% to 4½%. A veteran who had already borrowed 2½% of the face value of his certificate could raise another 27½% on it. Veterans' Bureau actuaries estimated that this measure would cost $700,000,000.