The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [24]
On the day the gasoline bill goes to Rules, all four Democrats are in place right from the start and all four are antsy, tapping pencils against their table places on the left-hand side of the room. I slide into the back row, a few minutes before Barton strolls in to take his seat in the witness chair. None of the reporters from the briefing across the hall in the press lounge a few minutes ago have bothered to come in here. There are three rows of chairs in the gallery, and the crowd looks mostly to be made up of aides to the day’s witnesses, who include Barton and a few other members of the Energy and Commerce Committee. As usual, the Rules hearing is strictly an insider deal, no C-SPAN cameras, no reporters, nothing. The lone civilians look to be me and a pair of bloggers.
Dreier, the chairman, is, as usual, not chairing the hearing. Like Charlie in Charlie’s Angels, the well-dressed Dreier (who in 2004 won the prestigious Roy Cohn Award, given by gay activists to the closeted politician most hostile to gay political interests) tends to play up his scary-villain rep by remaining off camera as much as possible. In his place he usually trots out the committee’s resident ballcarrier, Lincoln Diaz-Balart of Florida. A nephew of Fidel Castro and a faithful devotee of the cologne-soaked car-salesman look popular among some southern congressmen, Diaz-Balart is one of the House’s all-time blowhards, a guy who before the Republicans took control of the House made a career blasting the Democrats for not allowing open-rule bills to reach the House floor. “You know what the closed rule means,” he said, back in 1992. “It means no discussion, no amendments. That is profoundly undemocratic.”
That was then. Thirteen years later, Diaz-Balart is presiding over a Rules Committee that no longer allows any open rules, but the lack of democracy doesn’t seem to bother him now. Not much does. The Floridian seems happy most of the time, and never happier than when he can kick off a Rules hearing with some good old-fashioned ball-washing:
“I just want to commend Mr. Barton for his continuing hard work on very tough issues and hard work in an important way focused on this issue close to recent national disasters, the refineries in this country,” he said as Barton slid into his seat. “I was really shocked [he put his hand over his heart] to see that as we quadrupled our gross domestic product we have not built a single refinery. If that is not an ultimate example of sitting on our superpower laurels, I don’t think anything is. We have to address these issues if we are to continue to be the strongest and most dominant economy in the world. And I just…I want to commend the chairman for his hard work!”
“Thank you,” said Barton.
Diaz-Balart opened the floor for questioning. One by one, the Democrats listed all of the reasons this emergency refinery hurricane bill had nothing to do with gas, refineries, or the hurricane. Slaughter, the Democrat from Buffalo, read Barton a quote from the Washington Post noting that the United States has not built a refinery since 1976 and that most oil executives feel the number of refineries needed to be reduced, not increased. She also quoted the chief refining director at the American Petroleum Institute, Edward Murphy, who said that there was no shortage of capacity.
“Do you think that passing the bill will change their minds and they will suddenly want to build refineries?” Slaughter asked. “Or are they going to take the less regulations on Clean Air and run and be happy?”
Barton smiled and twirled a pen