Ten Days Until Christmas

This weekend Congress will have only ten days left--out of the 23 allowed by the President's ultimatum--to give him a law to stop inflation. Time was getting short, but Congress was working itself up to the effort.

Fact was that a good six of the 23 days had been needed for a very essential process: Congress had to cool down enough to stop spluttering over the President's attack on it for having forbidden price control of farm products below 110% of parity.

Indirectly the President made a little effort to smooth Congress' fur. He announced that he saw no need to draft 18-and 19-year-olds until next year. That announcement took the heat off Congress for dodging that responsibility until after election. It was like a gesture saying "we are all politicians together."

Broad Grant. Bald, faithful Speaker Sam Rayburn, who rushed back from a vacation on his Texas ranch to steer some kind of measure quickly through the House, soon sensed Congress' temper. He and the House majority leader, tall, toothy John W. McCormack of Massachusetts, huddled with the President, made their plans.

Finally, as this week began, the joint resolution agreed upon at the White House conference was dropped into the Senate hopper by Michigan's Prentiss F. Brown, who steered the original price-control bill. The resolution "authorized and directed" the President to stabilize prices, wages, salaries and "other factors" affecting the cost of living, substituted 100% of parity (or the highest price this year) for 110%, directed that stabilization should be based on the levels of Aug. 15.

But it was a far cry from an agreement at the White House to an agreement on Capitol Hill. In the House, Chairman Henry N. Steagall introduced a bill more pleasing to the farm bloc: it established a new, higher kind of "parity" based partly on wages paid to farm help and guaranteed farmers these parity prices for three years after the war. Rayburn conferred, reconferred, conferred again.

The Senate resolution, with a minimum of details over which Congressmen could bicker, looked like the only kind of action that could possibly be taken by the Oct. 1 deadline. The question now was whether the members would oppose it in public as bitterly as they did in private. Sam Rayburn held his breath.

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