Congress: The Same Old Saw

Congressional conservatives are preparing a Procrustean bed for the President's program--his Urban Affairs Department, his trade proposals, and his health care bill. In shelving the President's proposal for an Urban Affairs Department, the House Rules Committee fired the first shot in the expected Congressional battle over that program, though on an unexpected front. The action resembled somewhat the South's firing on Fort Sumter 101 years ago: it began a struggle which had to come, but came as a bit of a surprise.

The President expressed his surprise at the Committee's decision in a press conference the next day, singling out as objects of his astonishment the Republican members of the body. He was surprised that they didn't show more solicitude for urban and Negro voters: they evidently hadn't learned the lesson of the Presidential election.

Actually, the President didn't need to submit his proposal to the Committee in the first place; he could simply have had the proposal brought up on the House floor by his reorganiaztion authority. This he has since done. Sending it to Rules was a shrewd move, however, because it gave the Republicans a chance to put their feet in their mouths. They did, and the President considers them one down in the '62 campaigns as a result.

Defeat in Victory

If this political victory is exhilarating for Mr. Kennedy, the policy defeat must be depressing. Although he will ultimately get his Department, he has learned that the Republican leadership in the House intends to fight his program in the neolithic terms of American conservatism. This means they categorically opposed extensions of government operation, defend "states' rights," and refuse to send beyond the limits of the old Congressional game, which assumes both that political roles are neatly divided between the President and Congress, and that the position of Congress is inevitably that of a brake on a too-zealous executive. (The new House Majority Leader, Repi. John McCormack, is a man dedicated to this game; it produced him.)

Republican opposition to the Urban Affairs Department may be assumed typical of the Conservative line on the rest of the program. The terms of the opposition are depressing, because Mr. Kennedy's program implies his opinion that no one seriously believes in these old conservative homilies any more. He assumes agreement between the President and the people that the U.S. can no longer consider itself the fragile legal invention conservative formulas claim to protect and defend.

The Republican decision to join Southern Democrats in defence of these "principles" means that there will be a strong, pugnacious, old-fashioned conservative coalition in ready opposition to the President's program. Whatever may be Mr. Kennedy's opinion of its advisability, the Republican decision must have an element of political calculation in it.

To figure out the logic behind the position is, however, difficult. In a column on the subject, Walter Lippmann gave up: he concluded that, in their stand on the Urban Affairs Department, the Republican had simply made a mistake. Indeed, there is something mindless (or at least, unreflecting) about their choice of a position.

But basically, the choice reflects their conviction that Congress is far more important now than it was under Eisenhower (a weak, not a strong President, produces a weak Congress). They sense a real challenge to their way of thinking, and do not share the President's conviction that the country is behind him. Rather, they think the country shares their feeling that a thoughtless and improvident Administration is attacking their fundamental tenets. Thus they feel they must assert them all the more strongly.

The President's program is just such a challenge to their way of thinking. He believes that this country must be far more perceptive in dealing with domestic and foreign problems than it has been, precisely because its self-image has been wrong since the War. It conceived itself as the undisputed heir to Western hegemony. It was not. In Joseph Kraft's phrase, in the current Harper's, this is the "myth of the American century." Moreover, the country has failed to institutionalize social and economic changes, so as to keep democracy up-to-date.

It is this latter failure on which the Republicans have based their political calculation. Frequently, Republicans in Congress are really what the New Republic calls "unrepresentatives," in power only because. Republican-controlled state legislatures have refused to re-district. The line of opposition these Congressmen have taken is addressed to a United States that no longer exists, namely, the rural country that elected them. Their opposition to the Urban Affairs Department symbolizes the anachronism. As the New Republic notes: "The make-up of the House reflects the increasing under-representation of urban areas... Farm areas now have 20 to 30 seats that could not stand the test of equitable reapportionment."

The Republicans must be aware of this. Their opposition to the President's program thus looks like attempt either to block the country's wishes, or to regain power by scaring the populace out of its new-found sanity with talk of threats to phony basic tenets. In either case, this is "playing politics" with a vengeance.