Congress' Week

The time for politeness was past. Republicans and Democrats in the Senate were playing for keeps. Last week, for the first time in 14 years, Republicans knew what it meant, as the party in power, to have to strain every muscle to win a decision in a no-quarter contest. With the aid of Texas' "Pappy" O'Daniel they continued the special War Investigating Committee (TIME, Jan. 27).

Democrats feared that under Maine's Owen Brewster, the revived committee would spend most of its time turning up campaign ammunition for 1948. Publicly they charged that extension of the committee violated the spirit of the La Follette-Monroney reorganization act. But each house is the judge of its own rules, and the G.O.P. majority judged it no violation. Even so, the vote was too close for comfort: 47 to 45. What hurt the Republican leadership most was that four of their own number--New Hampshire's Tobey, Vermont's Aiken, Oregon's Morse and Kentucky's John S. Cooper--voted against them. Freshman Cooper's explanation of his vote was refreshingly forthright: "I thought it was the wrong thing to do. Though I believe in party organization and fidelity, I didn't think it was the overbearing consideration here."

The Lowest Terms. Despite this narrow squeak, the Republican leadership marched straight up to an identical crisis two days later, forced establishment of another separate committee--Small Business--under the chairmanship of Nebraska's rambunctious Kenneth Wherry.

"The real motive behind [this]," shouted Maverick Tobey, "was to provide a committee chairmanship for the Senator from Maine and the Senator from Nebraska. That is reducing it to its lowest terms." For Brewster, it was too low--"a level with which I don't care to be associated. I don't want to argue with a skunk."

Men at Work. Between debate days, the Senate's standing committees went ahead with their duties in obedience to the reorganization act. The Labor Committee, under Ohio's Robert Taft, had a time schedule as neatly laid out as the Senator's departmentalized mind. It would take, said he, six weeks to consider the mass of labor legislation in its baskets. But the committee got off to a slow start. Labor Secretary Schwellenbach had a cold which kept him from appearing. Instead, the committee heard two of its own members whose views it knew well already: Montana's pro-labor James E. Murray, who tried to delay legislation by having a commission probe labor relations first, and Minnesota's Joe Ball, who argued for stern restrictions on labor for the nation's welfare.

In another chamber the Public Works Committee was performing the traditional rite of examining the fitness of the President's nominee for a high office: Gordon Rufus Clapp, 41, as chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority. A quiet, earnest career man, with reams of TVA statistics on the tip of his tongue, Clapp would have had easy going but for the running grudge fight waged by aging, crotchety Kenneth McKellar against all TVA officers because they refuse to hire his political hacks. After a series of insulting questions, McKellar had to be called to order by Chairman Chapman Revercomb. Clapp would be approved.

Out of school, Senators had fun. At a Maine dinner, acidulous Bob Taft challenged the Democrats to a beauty contest. Florida's nimble-witted Claude Pepper, no Adonis either, cracked: "In a beauty contest I am paired with the Senator from Ohio."

The House paid little attention to the doings in the Senate; its members were busy in a dozen different directions. New Jersey's J. Parnell Thomas promised mysterious but piping-hot revelations from his Committee on Un-American Activities. Michigan's Albert J. Engel disagreed with his Republican colleague, Harold Knutson, on a straight 20% slash in income taxes, complaining "that doesn't help the little fellow much." Mississippi's John Rankin, a junior Bilbo, dramatically unrolled a yards-long petition bearing thousands of signatures, inviting a witch hunt for subversives in the movie industry. That would be a sure-fire way to stay in the headlines.

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