"And Then WHAM!"

With the immediate result Administration Spokesman Tom Connally was well enough satisfied: the Senate, 40 votes to 29, passed a joint resolution validating an agreement with Panama on U.S. property and war bases.*

But a larger significance attached to the argument over the way the pact had been presented to Congress. It was before the Senate not as a treaty, requiring a two-thirds majority in the Senate, but as a joint resolution needing only a majority. The Administration was taking this means to avoid almost certain defeat by isolationists, plus the risk of upsetting good neighborliness in a bruising give-&-take argument.

Rumbled California's Hiram Johnson: "The power of the Senate is very great. No wonder that certain persons want to see its power curtailed. . . . They wish it because they have some ulterior motive in preventing the exercise of the treaty-making power in the manner required by the Constitution." Missouri's Bennett Champ Clark said a friend told him it was common talk in the State Department that there was no intention of submitting a peace treaty to Congress at the end of the war but that arrangements would be concluded by executive agreements. Asserted Ohio's Robert A. Taft: "There is a tendency toward executive usurpation of power in this field, as in domestic legislation."

Uprose one and another of the 21 Republicans who (with seven Democrats and Independent George W. Norris) were opposed to approving the agreement; they spoke much more of the danger of short-circuiting the Senate than of the legislation itself, or its purpose of keeping the U.S. end of a bargain Panama had fulfilled.

About them Texas' Tom Connally, Foreign Relations Committee chairman, was apprehensively outspoken: "They are just laying for the peace treaty to come, and then WHAM! That's what they'll do. This is just a foreshadowing of what we can expect." He spoke with cause: in the next two years Democrats will have 57 Senators --not a treaty-making majority even with every one in line.

*Signed May 18, the agreement legalized the status of the U.S. air base at Rio Hato; granted the U.S. other bases' within Panama; allowed U.S. use of adjacent waters. In return, the U.S. gives over building lots worth $11,500,000 in Colon and Panama City; delivers American-built water and sewer systems in the two cities; pays off $2,700,000 of Panama indebtedness incurred in building a highway to Rio Hato.

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