by Matt Taibbi
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 tobacco farm in the rural South…”
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 use of suspension bills noted that by the 108th Congress—the second Congress of the Bush era—some 79 percent of all bills passed were suspension bills. Until about a dozen years ago, that figure hovered consistently between 40 and 50 percent.
A report by Democrat Louise Slaughter, one of the minority four suffering Democrats on the Rules Committee, put it bluntly:
“House Republicans continued to squeeze out real debate on controversial issues in the House by devoting more and more floor time to suspension bills…In the 108th Congress, Republican leaders apparently decided that the House should spend two out of the three days of its already abbreviated legislative week on noncontroversial legislation, such as bills that name post offices and congratulate sports teams.”
What these reports don’t say in stark-enough terms is that the whole idea behind all of these suspension bills is to make the official business of Congress an endless stream of meaningless, boring, literally unwatchable bullshit. No human being with any self-respect could ever watch more than ten minutes of this stuff per month, and for the leaders of Congress, that’s a wonderful thing. Because the real business of Congress happens mostly behind closed doors, in obscure committee meetings, with the most important and weighty of these taking place at preposterous hours and in late-night “emergency” sessions.
No one ever asks why Congress needs to debate massive energy bills, or sweeping, pork-filled highway legislation, or friendishly transparent corporate handouts like the prescription drug benefit bill late at night, when its days are spent naming auditoriums and sending letters to the wives of dead orchestra conductors. Clearly, if the House leaders wanted to, they could take care of all that naming and congratulating in the off-peak hours, or not bother with it at all. This gross scheduling absurdity is much commented upon among congressional staffers, most all of whom interpret this state of affairs the same way.
“The difference between now and before,” says Fred Turner, chief of staff of Congressman Alcee Hastings, one of four Democrats on the vital Rules Committee, “is that before, when the Democrats controlled Congress, we held all the key committee hearings at ten a.m. on Tuesday. Now it’s three a.m. on Thursday. Everyone knows why they do it: so that the press won’t be here to watch, so that everything makes the papers a day late, and so on. They don’t want you to watch.”
But what happens if you do watch? What will you see?
ON THAT SAME THURSDAY afternoon in October when Duncan, Davis, et al. were rhapsodizing over Whistle Stop, the schedule for House activity on the floor had been about par for the course. Frankenstein look-alike and Arkansas Democrat Mike Ross ate a few minutes welcoming his hometown pastor to Congress (“My faith is profoundly important to me, and Reverend Kassos is not only my spiritual adviser, he is my friend and he is my fishing buddy…”).
Under-investigation Ohio congressman and Jack Abramoff buddy Bob Ney took a moment to honor a soldier who had been shot six times (“Matt Smith represents some of the best America and Ohio have to offer”). Virginia Foxx of North Carolina honored a volunteer firefighter from her district. John Mica of Florida passed a measure renaming a building in the American diplomatic mission in Jamaica after Colin Powell. There were resolutions about National Campus Safety Awareness Month a
nd National Pancreatic Cancer Awareness Month, and the contributions of African American basketball players were recognized.
There was the Ava Gardner Post Office, a statement honoring a Nevada family whose son died in his sleep, a resolution celebrating the career of Simon Wiesenthal, and so on, and so on.
Finally the gavel pounded and House floor adjourned for the day. But one floor up, in a cramped room full of puke-green chairs, another wing of the House was just opening for business.
SAINTS HAVE THE VATICAN, Jews the Wailing Wall, warriors the fields of Marathon, Stalingrad, Normandy.
Cynics have the Rules Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives.
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 landscape of Barton’s good-ole-boy face is a faint air of surprise, as if he were amazed that he was actually about to get away with writing a bill this bad.
For Barton’s bill is a new low, even for this Congress. A masterpiece of shameless opportunism and sheer balls, HR 3893 of the 109th Congress, the Gasoline for America’s Security Act, was conceived by Barton’s office before the bodies in New Orleans had even cooled. The storm hit New Orleans on August 29, and this bill was presented for consideration to the house in what would end up being very close to its final form just over three weeks later, on September 26.
Ostensibly, the problem the bill addresses is the damage caused by the storm to the country’s refinery capacity, a problem that came before the public eye via the skyrocketing gas prices that swept the country after the storm. The bill was written in the weepy, hands-over-the-heart, your-pain-is-our-pain language peculiar to corporate handouts disguised as altruistic public relief programs—a literary genre that saw tremendous creative innovation in the period after the historic storm. The relevant passage of HR 3893 read as follows:
(3) Hurricanes Katrina and Rita substantially disrupted petroleum production, refining, and pipeline systems in the Gulf Coast region, affecting energy prices and supply nationwide…
(4) It serves the national interest to increase refinery capacity for gasoline, heating oil, diesel fuel, and jet fuel wherever located within the United States, to bring more reliable and economic supply to the American people.
(5) According to economic analysis, households are conservatively estimated to spend an average of $1,948 this year on gasoline, up 45 percent from 3 years ago, and households with incomes under $15,000 (1/5 of all households) this year will spend, on average, more than 1/10 of their income just on gasoline.
The bill, in other words, was written with the aim of sparing less fortunate Americans the pain of spending a tenth of their income on gasoline and helping to avoid even steeper costs.
Barton’s plan for achieving this, however, included no new measures whatsoever and did nothing at all about the price of gasoline. Instead, Barton simply used the bill to trot out an ancient, oft-rehashed laundry list of energy industry wet dreams, including the reigning legislative fantasy of the combustible-fuel industry: the repeal of the new source review provision of the Clean Air Act.
The repeal of new source review is one of those things—the opening of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) for petroleum drilling and the repeal of the capital gains tax being two of the others—that Republican lawmakers ask for whenever any hideous crisis hits the newspapers. The party’s gift for this kind of abject political non sequitur has been a defining characteristic for about a dozen years now, but especially in the last five. Terrorists strike New York? We better repeal the estate tax, quick! Asian bird flu on the way? Millions will die—if the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 isn’t overturned!
The classic example of this, of course, was Alaska senator Frank Murkowski’s heartfelt plea, just two days after 9/11, to open ANWR for oil development, as a means of combating the terrorist threat. Not surprisingly, the Republicans went after ANWR again after Katrina, and also humped another old target—the prohibited offshore drilling zones of the outer continental shelf. Those measures were junked at the last minute in committee, but the gutting of the long-loathed Clean Air Act was the biggest and juiciest prize—and it appeared to have survived in the final version of Barton’s gasoline act.
New source review has been a regulatory bee in the bonn
et of the energy industry since 1970, when the Clean Air Act Extension first went into effect. Essentially, the measure dictated that pre-1970 plants and refineries could continue to pollute at pre-1970 legal levels, but that new plants and old plants modified with new equipment had to reduce emissions and use state-of-the-art scrubbing technology—an expensive proposition, opponents have long said, for the beleaguered oil industry.
Barton’s party had taken several swipes at new source review, all unsuccessful, in the past few years alone. In the spring of 2001, the now-notorious Cheney energy task force issued a report recommending that the attorney general take a look at new source review to see if it was consistent with the law.
The AG never took up that fight, but that might have been because the administration by then had found a new avenue of attack. The hilariously named “Clear Skies” bill of 2002, sent to the Hill by the Bush administration for the consideration of Congress, included a provision that would have exempted all existing plants from new source review requirements.
When that bill was blocked in Congress, the administration went another route, taking aim at the bill via executive branch regulation. In December 2002, the Environmental Protection Agency under Bush came up with a series of loopholes aimed at helping factories and power plants avoid requirements to modernize. The provisions were challenged and mostly defeated in the District of Columbia Circuit Court, but this was no deterrent to the EPA; under a year later, in August 2003, it came out with yet another new rule designed to circumvent new source review, which the court again struck down. New source review, despite repeated attacks, remained a heavy rope around the neck of industry.