The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [14]
I sighed. I had been to enough day sessions of Congress to know how the rest of this drill worked. Across the gallery, I watched with amusement as the ITHACA IS GORGES family gravely considered the great drama unfolding on the floor below them. They probably came here to see, who knows, free trade or military aid or even stem-cell research or something like that debated, and here instead is this too-old starfucking jackass from Tennessee gushing to an almost completely empty hall about what was probably the whack-off sex-symbol icon of his youth, Ava Gardner. Duncan blathered in this vein for some time, then switched gears; the plain-talking southern isolationist suddenly assumed the fruity diction and pointy-headed public persona of a Leonard Maltin or Jeff Lyons:
“In 1946,” he said, “she landed her first starring role in the B-grade movie Whistle Stop. Later that year, on loan from MGM, Universal Studios cast her in her breakout hit, The Killers…”
Finally he concluded:
“Ava Gardner, the earthy girl from North Carolina, had beaten the odds to become one of Hollywood’s most famous icons.”
Jesus Christ, I thought. With all this diva worship, this guy is turning Congress into a West Village revue. Across the way, Husky Fam fidgeted, and Dad frowned; what the fuck was this?
It got worse. When Duncan finished, he was succeeded by a series of colleagues. Danny Davis, the stately black congressman from Chicago, took the podium; his Gardner films of choice were not Whistle Stop and The Killers but The Barefoot Contessa, The Sun Also Rises, and On the Beach. Davis also noted that Gardner “was married to three legendary Hollywood actors, including Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, and Frank Sinatra.”
Next in line was Bob Etheridge, the North Carolina Democrat who was the apparent author of the bill. Etheridge reiterated some of the earlier points about Ava Gardner and added that “she was America’s sweetheart during Hollywood’s golden age” and that she was “the first woman from North Carolina to grace the cover of Time magazine.”
When everyone was done, Biggert mumbled something about suspending the rules and taking a vote, and a vote was taken of those few members present. When it passed, I heard the blow of a gavel, and the Ava Gardner Post Office officially came into being. Smithfield, strike up the band!
Davis, Etheridge, and Duncan, the trio of Ava Gardner fans, slipped out of the gallery together, chatting on the way, probably comparing pinupgal memories. The gavel sounded again, and for an uncomfortably long while there were, excepting the Speaker, no representatives on the floor. Literally nothing was happening. The great ship of state slowed, the sails slacked—doldrums again.
The tourists in the visitors’ gallery filed out, looking bummed. I went back to sleep.
AN AIDE to a Democratic congressman put it to me this way, over coffee in a basement cafeteria:
“What you see out there is a joke,” he said. “What’s on the floor on a day-to-day basis—it’s theater, not government. It’s ten hours a day of naming post offices and congratulating Little League teams. Everyone knows they do all the real business when no one’s there. In the middle of the night. Early in the morning, before the sun comes up.”
Most anyone who has seen Mr. Smith Goes to Washington or is old enough to remember the Schoolhouse Rock jingle imagines Congress to be an august body where a diverse crowd of hundreds of elected officials, representing every remote corner of the country, exhaustively debate all the important issues of the day in electrifying day-long political-philosophical discussions on the House floor.
The reality is that the debate has mostly been removed from the House schedule. In the main chamber, the majority of the House’s time is spent on what are called “suspension bills,” in which the normal House rules are suspended. In a suspension bill, only forty minutes of debate are allowed, no amendments can be offered, and a two-thirds majority vote is required for passage.
One think tank’s report on the