The Nixon Administration has scheduled five Cabinet members and two White House economic experts to testify on the Trade Reform Act and against the inclusion in it of the Jackson Amendment at the hearings by the Senate Finance Committee on the proposed legislation in early March.
A similar array testified for the Administration at the hearing before the House Ways and Means Committee but the Representatives, by a 4-1 margin, approved legislation identical to the Jackson Amendment proposed by Representatives Wilbur Mills (D. Ark.) and Charles A. Vanik (D. Ohio). This is part of the legislation that is to be aired in the Senate. The legislation adopted by the House as Title Four of its trade bill directs the U.S. government to refuse trade benefits and credit to the Soviet Union and other “non-market” (Communist) countries until they relax their emigration restrictions on all citizens, including Jewish citizens.
Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, Treasury Secretary George P. Schultz, William D. Eberle, special White House representative for trade negotiations, and Peter Flanigan, executive director of the White House Council on International Economic Policy, will be the top Administration witnesses at the hearings March 4 and 5. Sen, Russell B. Long (D. La.), the Finance Committee chairman, will preside at the hearings.
On the following day, three additional Cabinet members will testify. They are Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz, Labor Secretary Peter Brennan, and Commerce Secretary Frederick Dent. The major difference in the Administration’s line-up at the Senate hearings is that William P. Rogers, who was then Secretary of State, led off the testimony on the legislation. Now it will be Kissinger.
Seventy-eight Senators, almost four-fifths of the members of that body, have sponsored the Jackson Amendment, but the Administration harbors hopes of killing the Amendment or watering it down when the trade bill as a whole goes into a Senate-House conference for ironing out of differences that inevitably occur in measures of this sort.
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