The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [13]
A FEW MINUTES LATER I’m asleep on the other side of the gallery, in the press section. With all the traveling I do, my naps are great black oceans weighing millions of tons; my dreams have no plots and no people, just darkness and wriggling shapes. I love sleeping and do it as much as possible, especially in Congress. I’m awakened, however, by the sound of a falling gavel.
“The chair recognizes the gentleman from Tennessee!”
It’s Thursday, October 6, 2005. As is almost always the case, the press section is completely empty. Most of the media sentenced to cover Congress do so from one of Washington’s great oases of I-don’t-give-a-fuck, the press lounge behind and above me, a lifeless little cave with an oldish Coke machine, three clean toilets, and a lot of milling middle-aged reporter types moving slowly if at all, grazing on paper press releases and the endless drone of C-SPAN on the monitors. In the vast congressional zoo the press lounge is one of the very lamest attractions, the equivalent of a three-goat petting run. And the goats almost never come out from behind their rock, into the actual gallery where they might be seen. They stay in their cave, because most of the time, there’s just not a lot for a goat to see in the House gallery.
“Madam Speaker,” yawns a voice from below, “I yield myself as much time as I may consume…”
The voice belongs to John J. Duncan, Jr., better known as Jimmy Duncan, Republican of Tennessee. Duncan is a conservative’s conservative—he was one of the few Republicans to vote against the Iraq war, using the roughly hundred-year-old excuse that it required of us Americans too much involvement in foreign affairs. A classic isolationist and one of many members who occupy an essentially hereditary congressional seat, Duncan assumed his office after the death in 1988 of his father, John Duncan, Sr., who had been elected to office twelve consecutive times. Three hundred years from now, the city of Knoxville’s congressman will be a Duncan opposed to the extension of foreign aid to Pluto.
This particular Duncan is easy to spot because he has Newt Gingrich’s shock-white Leslie Nielsen haircut. He’s also one of many southern congressmen whose glowing white orthodonture is visible from a hundred yards off. From my cozy seat up in the gallery I watch now as these superior teeth begin pleading their case to the Speaker,*1 who at the moment is not Dennis Hastert but the momlike Illinois Republican Judy Biggert.
One of the great populist myths about Congress is that our elected leaders are lazy bums who do very little work for their money. This is not the case; the vast majority of congressmen and-women actually work surprisingly long hours and have very little free time. One of my earliest experiences in Congress involved following behind Vermont’s Bernie Sanders on the way to a committee hearing; when I made a joke about the committee adjourning early to let the members make their tee times, Sanders went ballistic on me. “No way. These guys work hard,” he snapped. And as I later saw, he’s absolutely right; most members are here late into every weekday evening.
But for all that, the guys who actually run the 109th Congress—Tom DeLay, Hastert, and the rest of the House leadership—are not often visible on the floor or anywhere else.
In any case, Duncan began his remarks:
“Madam Speaker,” he said, “I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (HR 3439) to designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 201 North Third Street in Smithfield, North Carolina, as the Ava Gardner Post Office.”
Time was taken for the clerk to read this new Ava Gardner bill into the record. The floor was then returned to Duncan, who noted that HR 3439 had been cosigned by all members of the North Carolina delegation. Then Duncan began a lengthy speech on the subject at hand:
“The life of Ava Gardner is a true rags-to-riches story that started on a