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By Root 891 0

was knocked out by it faster than Joe. The world melted around them. Charlie gumbied along, leaning on the stroller for support. Down an elevator into the Metro. Air-conditioning again, thank God. Crash into pink seat cushions. As they rode north, slumped and rocking slightly with their train, Charlie drowsily entertained Joe with some of the toys in the stroller, picking them up and fingering them one by one. “See, this turtle is NIH. Your Frankenstein monster is the FDA, look how poorly he’s put together. This little mole, that’s Mom’s NSF. These two guys, they’re like the guy on the Monopoly game, they must be the two parts of Congress, yeah, very Tammany Hall. Where the hell did you get those. Your Iron Giant is of course the Pentagon, and this yellow bulldozer is the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The magnifying glass is the GAO, and this, what is it, like Barbie? That must be the OMB, those bimbos, or maybe this Pinocchio here. And your cowboy on a horse is the President of course, he’s your friend, he’s your friend, he’s your friend.”

They were both falling asleep. Joe batted the toy figures into a pile.

“Careful Joe. Ooh, there’s your tiger. That’s the press corps, that’s a circus tiger, see its collar? Nobody’s scared of it. Although sometimes it does get to eat somebody.”

In the days that followed, Phil took the climate bill back to the Foreign Relations Committee, and the process of marking it up began in earnest. “To mark up” was a very inadequate verb to express the process: “carving,” “rendering,” “hacking,” “hatcheting,” “stomping,” any of these would have been more accurate, Charlie thought as he tracked the gradual deconstruction of the language of the bill, the result turned slowly into a kind of sausage of thought.

The bill lost parts as they duked it out. Winston fought every phrase of it, and he had to be given some things or nothing would proceed. No precisely spelled-out fuel efficiencies, no acknowledgment of any measurements like the ecological footprint. Phil gave on these because Winston was promising that he would get the House to agree to this version in conference, and the White House would back him too. And so entire methodologies of analysis were being declared off-limits, something that would drive Anna crazy. Another example of science and capital clashing, Charlie thought. Science was like Beeker from the Muppets, haplessly struggling with the round top-hatted guy from the Monopoly game. Right now Beeker was getting his butt kicked.

Two mornings later Charlie learned about it in the Post (and how irritating was that?):

Climate Superbill Split up in Committee

“Say what!” Charlie cried. He hadn’t even heard of the possibility of such a maneuver.

He read paragraphs per eye-twitch while he got on the phone and told it to call Roy:

…proponents of the new bills claimed compromises would not damage effectiveness…President made it clear he would veto the comprehensive bill…promised to sign specific bills on a case-by-case if and when they came to his desk.

“Ah shit. Shit. God damn it!”

“Charlie, that must be you.”

“Roy what is this shit, when did this happen?”

“Last night. Didn’t you hear?”

“No I didn’t! How could Phil do this!”

“We counted votes, and the biggie wasn’t going to get out of committee. And if it did, the House wasn’t going to go for it. Winston couldn’t deliver, or wouldn’t. So Phil decided to support Ellington on Ellington’s alternative-fuels bill, and he made sure they put more of Ellington’s stuff in the first several shorter bills.”

“And Ellington agreed to vote for it on that basis.”

“That’s right.”

“So Phil traded horses.”

“The comprehensive was going to lose.”

“You don’t know that for sure! They had Speck with them and so they could have carried it on party lines! Who cares what kind of fuel we’re burning if the world has melted! This was important, Roy!”

“It wasn’t going to win,” Roy said, enunciating each word. “We counted the votes and it lost by one. After that we went for what we could. You know Phil. He likes to get things done.