Adjournment
The 67th Congress, which came into office two years ago, will adjourn sine die at noon Sunday, March 4.
The 68th Congress, elected last fall, will be convened by law on the first Monday in December. *** No Extra Session Predicted
The 68th Congress can be called into special session at any time before the regular date for convening nine months hence. It rests with the President.
But President Harding has allowed it to be understood that he will not convene the new Congress until December, and for three good reasons:
1. The President and Mr. Hughes can develop a foreign policy more easily without Congress than with.
2. The new Congress will generate new opposition to the President in both home and foreign affairs.
3. Business is happier when the Capitol is deserted. Legislation and rumors of legislation cause prices to fluctuate.
Besides, Senators Borah, Johnson, Underwood are among those booking passage to Europe. *** Work of the 67th
Except the Senate's ratification of the Armament Treaties, little but routine work was done by the 67th Congress.
Congress, mightily Republican, opened by supporting the party and the party's President. Its climax was a high tariff. Its twilight came in November, when the political lives of many conservative Republicans were lost. Its end was a clattering of blocs—the farmer block, the veterans' bloc, the progressive bloc, the mothers' bloc. *** Unfinished Business
The 67th will receive both praise and blame for what it left undone. Among a mass of interesting business which it will probably hand down to Number 68, there are seventy-seven proposed amendments to the Constitution, including:
An amendment that would prevent issuance of tax-exempt securities.
An amendment to inaugurate the President and seat Congress in January instead of March, following election.
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Senator Oscar W. Underwood
He says he may contend for the Democratic nomination in 1924. He has sailed for Egypt
An amendment to provide a minimum wage law.
An amendment that would permit Congress to regulate the employment of women and of children under 18 years of age.
And also bills proposing:
A ship subsidy.
A soldier bonus.
Revised immigration regulations. *** Balance of Power
The Republican party will retain control of the next Congress. But its majorities are greatly reduced in both houses. Defection of six Republicans in the Senate would give the Democrats the upper hand. And there are more than six Republicans who can be listed as defectionists. *** Uncle Joe
Joseph Gurney Cannon, grand old man of Congress, will retire from public life. At the age of 86, having served 23 terms in the House of Representatives, he feels that he has earned the right to spend the rest of his life in the quiet seclusion of Danville, Illinois. Uncle Joe is something more than a politician with an age-record. He is the embodiment of a tradition, a political theory, a technique of party government and discipline that is fast perishing. He represents the Old Guard in the very flower of its maturity, in the palmy days of McKinley and Mark Hanna, when "a little group of wilful men" did more than make gestures of government; they actually ruled Congress, shrewdly, impregnably, and without too much rhetoric.
Uncle Joe in those days was Speaker of the House and supreme dictator of the Old Guard. Never did a man employ the office of Speaker with less regard for its theoretical impartiality. To Uncle Joe the Speakership was a gift from heaven, immaculately born into the Constitution by the will of the fathers for the divine purpose of perpetuating the dictatorship of the standpatters in the Republican Party. And he followed the divine call with a resolute evangelism that was no mere voice crying in the wilderness, but a voice that forbade anybody else to cry out—out of turn.
On March 4 Uncle Joe will be gone and Henry Cabot Lodge alone will remain to carry on the banner of the ideal. To the American people, however, the senior Senator from Massachusetts must perforce seem a little too genteel, too cold, too Back Bay to serve as an adequate trustee for the Old Guard tradition. They will long for the homely democracy of Mr. Cannon, so often expressed by those homely democratic symbols—Uncle Joe's black cigar and thumping quid. *** New Leaders—Robinson
Senator Joseph Robinson, Arkansas, will lead the Democrats on the floor of the Senate in these new Congress.
The more noted Senator Oscar Underwood, Alabama, resigned the leadership on account of ill-health. (Prophets say that he may be Presidential nominee in 1924.)
Senator Robinson is a fighting Southerner who talks with his fists. Born with a red-headed temper, he soon acquired freckles. But years of law and politics have induced a certain amiability, so that he now enjoys fishing.
He was permanent chairman of the San Francisco convention which nominated Cox.
Most famous of all his speeches was that against La Follette immediately before America entered the war. The most famous fortnight of his career was in 1912, when he went from Representative to Governor to Senator within 14 days.
He managed a Child Labor bill which the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional, and the daylight-saving law of war-times.
The immediate destinies of the Democratic party are largely within Senator Robinson's control.
