89th's Boo-Boo

It will come as sweet balm to those burdened with hour exams to learn that Congressmen don't do their reading either. The most recent demonstration is the passage of the bill creating the Department of Transportation.

Seems that in the bill is a teensy clause authorizing the Secretary of Transportation to "develop and construct a civil supersonic transport." Senator Warren G. Magnuson (D.-Wash.) who helped slip the seven words into the bill isn't sure what they mean; neither is the chief counsel to the Senate Commerce Committee who wrote it.

Virtually no one else in Congress had noticed the provision at all, though the Senate debated the bill for 40,000 words.

There is general agreement, however, that the clause will make it very difficult for Congress, which has never been willing to go on record as permanently favoring the project and has been financing it under the Federal Aviation Act of 1958, to cut off support. This lagniappe could cost the government several billion dollars over the next few years.

The liberal eyebrow arches at these goings-on, and the liberal finger is quick to point at sly ol' LBJ as prime mover in the proceedings. The truth is that the Administration didn't dare ask for a specific long-term appropriation, what with the Vietnam War and the Great Society, and indications are that the bureaucracy is every bit as surprised as the rest of us.

Senator Magnuson, we suppose, is overjoyed at the bill's passage. The Boeing Company, one of the two companies whose aircraft designs are now being evaluated in the final round of the superjet competition, has its headquarters in Seattle.