The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [16]
The home of Rules is a cramped room with dismal lighting, and on this overcast, unseasonably muggy day, its two-row gallery of vomit-colored chairs is packed with congressional aides and, uncharacteristically, a few reporters.
It’s about four thirty in the afternoon, or about a half hour after most of the congressional press called it a day and fled the Hill. The ones who’ve stayed did so to catch the appearance before the Rules Committee of Congressman Joe Barton (R-TX), the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who’s here on a semi-important errand.
In the congressional witches’ coven of influential blowhard Republican conspirators—a powerful league of villains that at the time included Republican House leaders like Jim Sensenbrenner, Roy Blunt, David Dreier, Dennis Hastert, Mike Oxley, and Tom DeLay, among others—Barton plays the role of the silver-tongued, laid-back, backwoods southern cop, forever knocking out the taillight of Progress.
While other Republican leaders tend to favor a public style of fist-pounding hysterics and outright verbal abuse, Barton will respond to a committee objection to this or that billion-dollar oil company handout by simply leaning back in his chair, smiling, and shrugging. Shucks, we did the best we could for ya…There jes’ wasn’t anythin’ we could do…I’s real sorry, ma’am, but we just had to kill the shit out of your bill.
Barton is at the Rules Committee now to shepherd a monstrosity called the Gasoline for America’s Security Act—colloquially called the new energy bill, as opposed to the old energy bill, an obscene porkfest passed that summer—through the last stages of the House approval process. With the exception of the initial emergency aid package, the Gasoline for America’s Security Act has been, to date, the most important piece of legislation proposed in response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster. It is also the first major piece of Katrina legislation to have made it this far, i.e., to the Rules Committee.
Having taken his seat in the witness chair, Barton now slouches, keeping one elbow propped on the table in front of him and letting one hand dangle to the side. His suit jacket has fallen open and one of his legs stretches forward, poking out from under the table in the general direction of Rules chairman David Dreier.
Barton is loose. He’s been cracking jokes ever since he walked in the room, and even when the Democrats on the committee try to ruin the mood by peppering him with nasty questions, he just answers them with a smile. After Barton delivers a baldly full-of-shit summary of the bill at hand, Democrat James McGovern comments that if he had given an answer like that to his constituents at a Massachusetts gas station, they “wouldn’t let me leave in one piece.”
“Well, what I do at a Texas gas station, when people ask if I’m Congressman Barton,” Barton says, smiling, “is this…I just tell ’em I’m his driver.”
Laughs all around. Even McGovern laughs. A humor nonaggression pact is in force in most of Congress: both parties always laugh at each other’s jokes, particularly when they’re of the inside-baseball, high-school-yearbook variety Barton has just whipped out at McGovern. A well-timed inside joke is the Get Out of Jail Free card of congressional debate.
Barton is about to say something significantly funnier, but the humor behind the next joke in the pipe is not easy to convey without a little background about the bill, about Barton, about Congress in general. C-SPAN is boring to the average viewer only because no one has time to swallow the backstory. If you follow it from episode 1, it’s funnier than Monty Python. Although September, the month of the Katrina disaster, was a little less funny than usual.
SO LET’S FREEZE the scene with Barton leaning back in his chair looking eminently pleased with himself, as only a man carrying a full bushel of Hot Steaming Dogshit for the consideration of the U.S. House Committee on Rules can look. The only detectable emotion on the happy halcyon