To the People

Each year, as Congress winds up its work, West Virginia's Bible-quoting Senator Matthew Neely denounces what he calls "the scourge of senatorial verbosity." Last week aging Democrat Neely came out from behind the three-foot piles of Congressional Records on his Senate desk and reported that in 155 days this year, Congress had filled 21,484 pages with an estimated 31,946,708 words at a printing cost of $1,842,140. Ten Senators (unnamed) had supplied half the words.

Deviltry Halted. Despite the scourge. the 83rd Congress had an extraordinary record of accomplishment. More than a decade ago, domestic legislation had been laid aside when Dr. Win-the-War, as F.D.R. phrased it, replaced Dr. New Deal. After the war. Harry Truman adopted the tactic of asking Congress for what he knew it would refuse. He berated the 80th Congress (Republican) as "do-nothing." The 81st and 82nd Congresses (Democratic) also did little.

The 83rd was not distinguished by great debates nor marked by sharp party cleavage. But the Administration took Congress seriously, and Congress took itself seriously. It worked haltingly and messily--but very hard. When the session ended, it became plain that Eisenhower and his congressional leaders between them had halted and perhaps reversed the drift toward welfare-statism.

The last week was what could have been expected from weary, uninspired, somewhat scared men. Tempers flared in the Senate one midnight when Majority Leader Knowland tried to postpone the final farm-bill vote, and when South Carolina's Olin Johnston tried to attach a civil-service pay raise to California's Santa Maria River project. But in the last minute helter-skelter, it was remarkable that the Communist outlaw bill (see below) was the only piece of political deviltry to be jammed into enactment.

Ring Out the Old. By week's end Congress had stamped its final seal of approval on a bale of bills. The main ones: flex ible farm-parity prices, atomic energy, death penalty for peacetime espionage, social security, foreign aid, 5% Government salary raise, unemployment compensation, higher national debt limit, Commodity Credit Corporation borrowing authority, Foreign Service expansion, and the "Hiss" bill revoking pensions of Government workers convicted of felonies or using the Fifth Amendment.

To announce the session's last roll-call vote in the House, Speaker Martin pounded a shattering, bell-ringing gavel, and the House burst into roars of laughter. Then at 7:38 Friday evening, page boys who gathered around the Speaker's dais threw paper into the air as Martin rapped the House into adjournment until next January.

Meanwhile the Senate was still talking. Nevada's dour George Malone was in a huff because Colorado's Eugene Millikin had blocked his pet bill to extend the tax-free whisky-bonding period. So Malone resolved to block Millikin's pet Colorado Basin project, which was the Senate's pending business. He talked about neither reclamation nor whisky and he talked for four hours. ("What is he talking about?" asked a late-coming reporter of a press-gallery attendant. "I don't know; he hasn't said," replied the attendant.) Finally Millikin threw in the towel, and at 10:51 the Senate adjourned and the Congress faced the people to give, by November, an account of its--and Eisenhower's--stewardship of the Republic.

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