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Reagan sent a letter to every member of Congress pleading for a yes vote, and House G.O.P. Whip Robert Michel of Illinois twisted Republican arms mercilessly. Eventually, Republicans did support their President by 150 to 36, and the full House passed the debt-ceiling increase by a vote of 305 to 104. In the G.O.P.-controlled Senate, however, Democrats played the same kind of charade that the Republicans had so long used on them. The Democrats pushed a motion to raise the debt ceiling by only $28 billion, rather than Reagan's requested $50 billion, on the specious ground that the President's drive to cut spending ought to make the bigger increase unnecessary. The motion was defeated by 51 Republicans and Democrat Russell Long of Louisiana, voting against 41 other Democrats. Even then, the Senate indulged in six hours of partisan wrangling and taunts before finally passing Reagan's request by 73 to 18.
The President is also encountering his first troubles with the Washington bureaucracy. In his initial hours in office, he ordered a hiring freeze that in effect blocked anyone who accepted a Government job after Nov. 5—the day after the election—from going on the payroll, unless he or she had actually reported to work by Inauguration Day. Washington resounded with tales of people who had quit other jobs, sold their homes and moved their families to the capital only to be denied promised Government employment. Reagan pledged to grant exemptions for true hardship cases, but that did not stop the National Treasury Employees Union, representing 120,000 federal workers, from asking the U.S. District Court to overturn the retroactive features of the hiring freeze.
So the howls begin in what undoubtedly will swell to a coast-to-coast chorus of complaints against the President's bold program. It is open to legitimate analysis, doubt and objection. Reagan will have to prove that whatever spending cuts he finally proposes will not hurt the "truly needy," a pledge that he repeated over and over last week. His tax-reduction proposal does indeed run a risk of swelling the deficit.
But the President's plans at least mark a sharp break with past spend-and-tax policies that, as he says so correctly, have failed spectacularly. And the need for vigorous, unconventional action can scarcely be denied. If the U.S. economy is not quite on the brink of "calamity," it is at least riddled by inflation and battered by recurrent recessions that to gether are reducing national standards of living. The burden of proof is on those critics who assail the President's program to show that they have a convincing alternative.
—By George Church,
Reported by Laurence I. Barren and Neil MacNeil/ Washington
—After the cameras stopped rolling, Reagan gave the 360 back to Fischer.