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Show New Demo Congress Rates As One of the Most Powerful The Democratic controlled Congress which meets in the capital shortly will be one of the most powerful ever to gather on Capitol Hill. As columnist Clinton Davidson points out, it will have more say over government policies than any Congress since the Civil War. Mr. Davidson noted further that: "That will be because no President in recent American history has ever had a Congress composed of so large a majority of members of the opposition party. "Both parties have had a larger majority in Congress, but never ern leaders. How well can they control a majority that sometimes some-times disagrees with them? "The most serious clash could be expected to come over labor legislation, taxes and spending. Many of the northern and eastern east-ern Democrats were elected with the financial support of organized organ-ized labor. Few of the southern Democrats had labor support. Southerners, too, are more conservative con-servative on taxes and spending. "Most people who are unfamiliar unfamil-iar with the inner workings of Washington assume that aside from the President, the most influential in-fluential men in the Capital are the members of the President's cabinet. at a time when the other party was in control of the Administrative Adminis-trative branch of government. We'll have a truly two-party government at least until 1961. "This imposes an unusually heavy responsbiility on the leadership lead-ership of the overwhelming Democratic majorities in both the Senate and the House, and on the chairmen of the various committees com-mittees which will have the responsibility re-sponsibility of developing legislation. legis-lation. "Most of the chairmen of the important congressional committees com-mittees will be from southern states. Nearly all of them have a long congressional record of Democratic conservatism on the domestic and foreign issues. "The fact that southern Democrats Demo-crats will be considerably outnumbered out-numbered by Northern, Midwestern Mid-western and western Democrats, mostly with a more liberal attitude at-titude toward government policies, poli-cies, poses a problem for south- "They credit the Secretary of defense, for example, with having hav-ing more influence than he actually ac-tually has over military matters or the Secretary of the Treasury with greater power than anyone else over spending and taxes. "Far more influential in the direction of military matters are Sen. Richard Russell of Georgia long time chairman of the Senate Sen-ate Armed Services Committee, and Rep. Carl Vinson, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. "On matters involving taxes and spending two other southern Democrats have more influence than the Secretary of Treasury. They are Sen. Harry F. Byrd of Virginia, known for years as the "watchdog of the Treasury" chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and Rep. Bruce M. Spence of Kentucky, a veteran chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee. |