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Show 1 WiilliW - WITH congress si ill ill (lit- hearing hear-ing stnsc on UMT and the draft; with congressional committees now uri'intr an even larger air force than ' the 55-group program suggested by ! the President; appointment of Paul j Hoffman. 1 president of Studebnker ; corporation to head ERP; hearings ! and debate on a new national high- way act; extension of reconstruction I finance corporation; the commodity credit corporation, federal aid to education ed-ucation and other time-consuming proposals, probably the most interesting inter-esting happing on the Washington scene was the flare-up of the butter vs. margarine question to repeal federal fed-eral tax on margarine. Under the efficient generalship of I I he veteran Harold D. Coolev of ' North Carolina, the petition lor a i discharge of the agricultural com- mil tee which pigeonholed the mar-! mar-! aarine bills was signed by 218 members, mem-bers, a majority of the house, thus I forcing the bills onto the floor for action by the entire membership, i The specific measure was one in-I in-I troduced by congressman L. Mendel i Rivers of South Carolina and con-' con-' uressman Robert J. Twyman of Illinois. Consideration of the measure likely will come before the house on April 26. Under the house rules a discharge petition may be considered the second or fourth Monday of any month. But the petition must have the required 218 signatures at least seven days before it is considered, so the 26th, being the fourth Monday of April, is the first day it could be taken up. If the house votes on the 20th to discharge the petition, the bill must be considered Immediately and the measure is the unfinished business until passed or rejected. According to the old-timers the discharge petition seldom fails of passage although it is seldom used since the job of getting a majority of signatures is well nigh impossible. The last time a discharge petition was used in the house successfully was in 1946 when a measure to give enlisted men terminal leave pay was discharged from the former military affairs committee of the house. The bill then passed the house and senate. The milk producers cooperative association, principal lobbyists agaflist the repeal of margarine taxes, believed they had the repeal bills safely stowed away when the agricultural committee by a vote of 16 to 10 pigeonholed them and announced an-nounced no further action would be taken. They were loo little ami i,M late, however, when delegations livmi tne Mid-west soybean stales and n10 cottonseed states got under wuv aided by a powerful consumers' oi housewives' mail campaign. Thev also failed to reckon with the veteran, vet-eran, Cooley, himself a member of the house agricultural committee. The concensus of opinion here ulso seems to be that the delegations from the dairy states may have relied re-lied too strongly upon the promises of congressmen Hope of Kansas and Anderson of Minnesota who, rumor has it, are prepared to work a double-steal with Hope moving up as secretary of agriculture, when and if , the GOP wins the coming election, and Mr. Anderson becoming chairman chair-man of the powerful agricultural committee from his position as ranking rank-ing GOP member. Be that as it may, the fact remains re-mains that the margarine repeal bill now promises to seethe light of open debate on the floor of the house with a majority of the house already having signed the petition to put it there. IMPORTANT IS THE FACT that a senate committee has voted approval ap-proval of a measure to admit 100,000 displaced persons to this country within two years. The problem has been before congress for two years without action. IN ANOTHER INSTANCE of enacting en-acting legislation to overrule decisions deci-sions of the supreme court, the senate sen-ate is now considering a measure to hold coverage of social security at present limitations. The measure under consideration passed the house on February 27. It was introduced in-troduced as a result of the court decision de-cision which held that insurance agents and door-to-door salesmen were to be included in social security coverage. CONGRESSMAN BURR P. HARRISON HAR-RISON of Virginia has introduced a bill which would give the President Presi-dent power to seize and operate the nation's coal mines until March 31 -1949. It would also revive and continue con-tinue certain provisions of the wai labor disputes act which expired last year. This measure and probably others along the same line which are now in the legislative mill are interesting in view of the question as to whether or not the Taft-Hartley act Is adequate to deal with emergency of coal mine strikes. |