The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [56]
He shook his head.
“What a bunch of pussies,” he said, chuckling.
When I asked what was on the agenda, they assured me that there were numerous ethics reforms on the way, but the bigger problem was that the Republicans had simply let their normal congressional housekeeping duties slide. They hadn’t passed a budget before leaving town, forcing Democrats to put something together at the last minute to keep the agencies operating. That’s how I left things that November—the Dems just moving in and immediately jamming their noses in the dreary muck of budget-building work. The last time I saw most of my “friends” on the Hill that season, they were looking haggard and sitting at desks overflowing with stacks of papers and budgetary requests.
Shortly thereafter I left town, and I finally went away to Texas for the winter, forgetting entirely about Washington politics through Christmas and the New Year. Occasionally, of course, I wondered what exactly was going on behind closed doors in those committee rooms back on the Hill. For six years ours had been a country dominated whole hog by Republican politicians, and the question of whether or not the Democrats upon returning to influence would represent a real opposition or a real alternative now loomed as the single weightiest question in American politics.
Shortly after the New Year I got a call from a friend in Washington, an aide to a certain unnamed congressman. I was in San Antonio at the time, splayed out in my boardinghouse bed, unshaven and more or less completely motionless, lazily watching an afternoon broadcast of one of Hagee’s sermons. My cell rang and I brought it to my ear slowly, like a tree sloth.
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“Hey, Taibbi,” he said. “The fuck are you?”
“I’m in San Antonio,” I said. “Praying to Jesus.”
“Yeah, right,” he said. “Anyway, get ready for a lot of bullshit.”
“As in what?”
“As in the budget,” he said. “They’re doing a CR. It’s absolutely crammed full of bullshit. Like you know how when you’re packing, and you can’t close the suitcase, so you jump on top of it, and it still doesn’t close, and then finally you sit on it and you get your girlfriend to try to zip it up while you’re sitting on it, and you’re bouncing up and down on the suitcase and finally after like half a fucking hour the both of you manage to close it, but just barely?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s how much bullshit is in this thing,” he said.
A CR is a continuing resolution. Basically, when Congress doesn’t have time to write up a completely new budget, it passes a CR, which funds the government at roughly the same level as the previous year. Congressional leaders will write up guidelines for each CR; they may specify, for instance, that all programs in the budget are to be funded at the lowest number among the House, Senate, and final budget versions from the previous year. In other words, if last year’s V-22 program is at $1 billion in the Senate bill, $1.2 billion in the House, and $1.4 billion after conference, this year the V-22 gets $1 billion. Old-timers of the budget process will tell you, though, that military programs tend to have pretty similar numbers across the board, while social programming may vary wildly from version to version—meaning CRs will end up naturally underfunding social programs compared to defense appropriations.
In any case, in the run-up to the release of the CR, the Democrats did a couple of things. The first was that Pelosi rammed through an “ethics bill,” a thing called the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, which was intended to be the Democrats’ response to the Jack Abramoff/ Duke Cunningham scandals of the Bush era. The bill prohibited lawmakers from knowingly accepting gifts from registered lobbyists or foreign agents and banned member use of corporate jets. Also, travel packages financed by outside interests would henceforth have to be approved by the Ethics Committee. This in theory was supposed