Word: 83rd
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...fill-in on recent Democratic developments from National Committee Chairman Steve Mitchell, and made a pair of well-publicized phone calls to tell Senate Minority Leader Lyndon Johnson and House Minority Leader Sam Rayburn that he was "mighty proud" of the party's record in the 83rd Congress. (One of his first acts on arriving in New York had been to call up Harry Truman in Independence. ) Mostly Adlai planned to spend his time resting, until Sept. 14-15, when Democratic bigwigs will officially welcome him home at a nationally televised rally in Chicago...
Holding up their partisan yardstick, the Democrats measured off the record of the 83rd Congress last week and ruled it a Republican fiasco. In a radio report to the nation last week, Dwight Eisenhower measured the 83rd's first session against the broad aims and purposes of his Administration and ruled it a good beginning -"I repeat-only a little more than a beginning...
Waiting for Policy. Still another characteristic of the first session of the 83rd was the fact that, as in most postwar Congresses, the spotlight of world news was elsewhere-on Moscow, Seoul and Panmunjom. This was partly the luck of the news. (Congress could hardly compete with Stalin's death, Beria's arrest, Rhee's stubborn stand, or the Korean truce.) But partly it was due to the fact that the initiative in world politics is still not in the hands of the U.S. The first great steps in getting it there are not up to Congress...
...Congress pushed through an impressive list of major bills (see box). By reducing spending, stopping the expansion of Government, it made the critical turnaround from 20 years of New and Fair Deals. But the 83rd took no broad, policymaking action on such basic issues as taxes, trade, agriculture and labor. These failures caused some Republican disappointment and elicited some Democratic jeers. The record of the 83rd, however, was a lesson in how hard it is to change the direction of the U.S. Government without rocking the boat...
...whole, this worked. From the first session of the 83rd, Ike got nearly everything he asked for. His greatest tactical victory was extension of the excess-profits tax, despite the opposition of Ways & Means Chairman Dan Reed. Ike's worst defeat was rejection of his eleventh-hour request for an increase in the U.S. debt limit. Significantly, the tactics of the debt-limit fight (see below) did not allow Ike to apply this one-by-one technique...