Above Inhibition

At 84, Missouri's Democratic Representative Clarence Cannon is gnarled, grouchy, and filled with angry energy. When he complains into House microphones about the wastrel ways of Government, the New Frontiersmen get worried--with good reason.

Government spending is probably the biggest legislative issue of 1963--and Cannon, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, has a lot to say about the Kennedy Administration's record-breaking $98.8 billion budget. Everything from ordering a new missile to building a new mile of highway must wait for action by Appropriations. And Cannon is proud of being a cheapskate with the taxpayers' money.

"We Must Cut." Ever since he went to Congress in 1922 (after a decade on Speaker Champ Clark's staff and as House parliamentarian), cranky Clarence has grumped around Capitol Hill, gaining few close friends, many enemies, and a great respect for his crafty mastery of the parliamentary and political intricacies of the House. A little fellow (5 ft. 7 in., 140 Ibs.), he has nonetheless had three fistfights with fellow Congressmen. His spending credo is simple: "We just must cut everything we can." Yet there is cause for his cantankerousness, which can only be born of frustration. For during the 18 years that he has been chairman of the Appropriations Committee, the U.S. Government has spent $1,404,825.266,705.

One great Cannon cross is the U.S. Senate, which he accuses of larding great gobs of cash onto spending bills that the House has cut to the bone. Last year Cannon propelled a resolution through his committee that charged the Senate with profligacy, noting that in the past ten years Senators had restored $22 billion previously slashed by the House. Virginia's Democratic Senator Willis Robertson, no great spender himself, called the resolution "the most insulting document that one body has ever sent to another." As he recalls that uproar, Clarence Cannon's face still fractures itself in a smile. He insists that the Senate has become much more responsible because of his taunts. "Why," he chuckles, "the first bill we sent over there this year, they cut it and cut it. They never used to do that at all."

"Never Such a Budget." Cannon is a proud Democrat ("It's the party to save the country"), and he thinks well of John Kennedy ("I'm strong for him"). But those emotions did not curtail his criticism of the President's budget message last January. Said Cannon to his House colleagues: "I have listened to messages from Presidents here in the House for 40 years, but in all that time I have never seen or heard a budget message like this one. And neither have you. Nor has anyone else."

Since then, Cannon's Appropriations Committee has not been notably rapid in sending spending bills to the House floor. When two of the first bills--for the Department of Labor and the Department of Health, Education and Welfare--did clear Appropriations last month, they totaled $5.4 billion, or $309.5 million less than the Administration had requested. That pleased Democrat Cannon. Says he: "Worrying about the party stand on something like that is an inhibition I don't have."

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