by Matt Taibbi
At the end of the sermon Sorensen indoctrinated the new members into the world of speaking in tongues, asking all who had not been baptized in the Holy Spirit to come forward and be anointed with oil. Those of us who had been baptized in the Spirit—and I had, of course, at the Encounter Weekend—were to come up and help the newbies. Specifically, we were supposed to stand behind them and catch them if they fell over with spiritual ecstasy.
I fell into the rear line, behind a pair of middle-aged new member women, and waited patiently. As Sorensen began anointing, the crowd all began to speak in tongues. Sorensen’s tongues were like Fortenberry’s—lots of lakakakashas and froooommms and see-bo-gralakashas, the same old Temple of Doom script. Sorensen’s gobbledygook was fluent but not particularly inspired; he looked like a man who gave 80 percent in everything he did, even playing the desperate. When he glanced at me, I rolled my eyes back and started tongue-speaking on cue. I was tired; this time I went with the Soviet national anthem:
Through tempests the sunrays of freedom have cheered us
Along the new path where great Lenin did lead.
To righteous endeavors he raised up the peoples,
Inspired them to labor and to valorous deeds!
Sorensen nodded appreciatively at me; I smiled. Then he doused the woman in front of me with oil, and she fell backward, babbling nonsense; along with two other men, I caught her and laid her on the floor. She had a huge smile on her face.
She was NOBODY.
BACK AT HOME, I sat at my desk, exhausted, and pulled my fortune cookie out of my pocket. It read:
There is no time like the pleasant.
On the other side of the paper there was a Chinese symbol. Next to it, in English, it read:
Milk.
SIX
Congressional Interlude II,
or
Democrats Seize the Reins of the Derangement
IT’S THE FIRST WEEK of November 2006, and I’m reclining in a state of mild-to-heavy sedation in a large and lifeless Marriott Hotel suite in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I’m here covering the midterm elections for Rolling Stone (specifically I’m here to poke a stick in the political corpse of Christ-humping senator Rick Santorum, who is about to lose his seat in a landslide), and while most of “progressive” America is popping the champagne corks, reveling in what looks like a stirring, throw-the-bums-out end to the Bush revolution, I’m feeling sick to my stomach.
The yellow legal pad covered with fevered scribbles lying next to me on the bed tells the story. My notes indicate that hours earlier, at 10:46 p.m., media demigod Barack Obama appeared on CNN, saying that the Democratic victory heralded “change” and a “new direction,” adding that the party anxiously awaited the conclusions of the Baker-Hamilton report on the Iraq conflict. Later, at 11:58, Rahm Emanuel—slimy brother of even slimier Hollywood superagent Ari Emanuel—promises “change” and a “new direction.” At 12:09 Harry Reid comes on the tube. His approximate quote: “All across America, from the deserts of somewhere to the streets of somewhere else, there is in the air the winds of change!” Roars, cheers from the crowd at this, then he adds: “We’re headed in a new direction!” Reid points out that the Baker-Hamilton report should offer some insight into what to do about the whole Iraq business.
Seven minutes later, at 12:16, it’s Nancy Pelosi’s turn. “Never have we made it more clear that we need a new direction,” she says. “Mr. President, we need a new direction!” She adds that she anxiously awaits the Baker-Hamilton report, which should help point the way forward in Iraq. At 12:24, someone asks Barack Obama, who is back on the air for what seems like the eight hundredth time tonight—the Dems are doing some serious brand-ID work this election—what he thinks the election results mean. Surprisingly, he says that it “confirms in my mind that the American people are eager to move in a new direction.”
At 1:12 a.m., it’s Dianne Feinstein’s turn to speak. She says the elections are “a signal for a change in direction.”
Apparently we need a new direction. We also need change. As for Iraq, that’s a tough one, but let’s wait for the conclusions of the Baker-Hamilton report, which might help us figure this shit out.
At some point in the midst of all of this, hurrumphing “political analyst” Jeff Greenfield comes on-screen. Commenting on the Democratic talking points, he has this to say: “They look to be very focus-group-tested for maximum appeal.”
Says this approvingly, smiling, with admiration. I reach over to the night table, feel around for the bottle, eat the last of my pills…
Most of the people I know who follow politics are whooping it up today, reveling in the walloping defeat the evil Bushies suffered at the polls, but it’s the other shoe that’s about to drop that worries me. I can already feel in my bones what’s coming. I’ve made quite a few friends among Democratic congressional staffers in recent years, most of them long-suffering political slaves laboring in windowless minority offices on the Hill—good guys most of them, sincere seeming, who’d tell me shocking tales of being ritualistically shat upon by the likes of Tom DeLay and Denny Hastert. They’d complain to me about the treatment their bosses suffered, sell it to me as crime against democracy, the People, and I’d buy most of what they were saying, because in most cases they were right.
Something tells me I’m going to stop hearing from those guys now. The phones are going to go cold. And I’m going to start seeing their bosses on TV with dumb grins on their faces and big erections in their pants, high on the smell of money and ’08 White House invites.
No voter wants to believe he doesn’t really matter, so he buys into the idea that there are two substantively different parties frantically competing for his attentions, the ideological fate of the country hanging on his decision every few years. It flatters the average citizen to think that way. The reality is that the dominant characteristic of our political system is the unchanging nature of the political consensus—while the two parties agree about most all of the important things, they disagree violently about the inconsequential stuff, providing the fodder and the drama for an endless political “struggle” that plays itself out in entertaining fashion every couple of years.
This business about waiting for the Baker-Hamilton report was a classic example. With popular discontent over the war raging, the Democratic Party still refused, technically, to come out against the war. It fudged the question of its original support for the invasion by claiming to have been misled en masse (despite the fact that even a small child could have seen through Bush’s idiotic argument for the invasion back in 2002), and as for the future, it refused to make any promise to try to end the conflict. Instead, for the biggest issue of the election season, for a national vote that for most people is their only political decision in years, the Democrats avoided taking any stance at all, essentially saying, “We’ll wait to see the conclusions of a random independent group of academics, and then we’ll make our own decision.” Basically, they punted and put the game in the hands of the defense.
The midterm elections might have marked the high point of the Bush revolution, the day the tide started receding, but it also marked the beginning of a new era. What followed would be a period dominated by the Democrats, in particular by the Democrats’ skillful massaging of the war issue. It would be a period where the Democrats would prove absolutely that it is possible in America to govern entirely on the appearance of principle—while changing absolutely nothing.
ABOUT A MONTH after the elections I dropped in on a few friends in Congress, just to see how the power transfer was going. All over the congressional complex—in House buildings like Rayburn, Longworth, and Cannon, and Senate halls like Dirksen and Russell—minority staffers were moving into the bigger, plusher majority offices in the Capitol Building.
At one committee office I found a gang of young Democrats openly chortling at the Republicans’ misery.
“You wouldn’t believe those guys,” said one. “They actually came by our office after t
he election and told us not to walk by their offices for a while, because it would hurt their feelings to be reminded that they have to move soon.”
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 to prevent the kind of skullduggery practiced by the Abramoffs of the world, who used golf junkets to Scotland and “fact-finding tours” to St. Thomas to buy government contracts and/or favors (like intervention in casino regulatory disputes) from members with a taste for luxury travel.
The second thing the Democrats did was pass a rules package containing what it called “earmark reform.” At the beginning of each Congress, the House passes what it calls a “rules package,” and the package is just that, a set of rules that govern how the House is going to operate. In this case, the rules package contained provisions that each bill passed by the House had to either contain a list of the earmarks included within (with the name of the member who requested the earmark listed next to it) or else contain a statement attesting to the absence of earmarks. Moreover, every listed earmark had to include a description of the earmark written by the requesting member, and that same member had to sign a statement attesting to the fact that he or she had not profited personally from said earmark.
If this all sounds confusing, it is. An earmark, to the uninitiated, is the basic currency of congressional corruption. Also called “state items,” earmarks are simply budget items not requested by the administration and jammed into a bill during the budget process by an individual representative. Say Congressman X receives ten grand each election cycle from a cement-mixing company; if he wants to repay that company with a government contract, he ducks into the transportation bill during markups (i.e., while it is being put together in committee) or in conference and gets himself a $10 million highway project stuck into the fine print of the law.
Until now these little budget items were totally unregulated and a source of massive, endemic corruption. Lobbyists and corporate hacks leveraged private money into public works time and time again, as a word to the right committee chair or ranking minority member could get just about anything for anyone, and only the hundred or so people on the Hill who actually know how to read the budget will even know. The notorious “bridge to nowhere”—a $230 million bridge connecting Anchorage and the Knik area of Alaska, which is home to about 250 people—was a classic example of the kind of shit that happens when earmarks go unchecked. That earmark achieved a kind of fame, and unlike most earmarks (which for ages simply appeared anonymously in print, neither noticed nor tied directly to anyone), the Knik bridge deal was almost right away revealed to be the work of Senator Ted Stevens, one of the most powerful legislators in Washington. As the head of the Senate Appropriations Committee, a guy like Stevens could, until this year, basically give himself any contract he wanted, jamming bridges and roads and weapons bills into a bill markup at the last minute, like a kid scribbling ice cream and cookie requests onto Mom’s shopping list.
The ethics bill and the rules package were intended to be linked, a matched set. With the ethics bill the Democrats addressed the means lobbyists and other interested parties used to gain access to lawmakers; with the rules package they addressed the means lawmakers used to execute the promised favors.
In theory.
In the weeks leading up to the Democrats’ unveiling of the CR, the word coming out of Washington, at least in the major media, was that the bill would be the “cleanest” budget in years. Even conservatives were praising the new Democratic leadership. Here’s an analysis of the upcoming CR by a pair of Heritage Foundation talking heads back in December of ’06:
With a better sense of the electorate’s anger over congressional corruption and profligate spending, incoming Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) instead plans to extend the money-saving continuing resolution over the entire year and thereby strip all earmarks from this year’s budget. In effect, and as some fiscal conservatives have urged, Pelosi intends to demonstrate that henceforth the budget of the United States government will be made in the United States Capitol, not in the offices of the several thousand lobbyists who have hijacked the process by selling earmarks to clients.
The much-ballyhooed “earmark-free” CR became so axiomatic that pretty soon p
rominent Democrats began to issue public statements praising it long before it was even a reality. Senator Robert Byrd and Congressman David Obey, the appropriations chairmen of their respective houses, issued a joint statement on December 11: “We will work to restore an accountable, above-board, transparent process for funding decisions and put an end to the abuses that have harmed the credibility of Congress.” The Washington Post took these statements at face value and on December 12 became the first of many major news outlets to run Congress stories with the phrase “earmark-free” or “earmark freeze” in the headline: “Democrats Freeze Earmarks for Now.” *2
A month or so later, on January 31, 2007, to be exact, the House passed the $463 billion CR by a huge margin, 286–140. Immediately Democrats rushed to take credit for the historically “clean” bill. Leading the charge was Rahm Emanuel, who chirped, “This is an earmark-free bill!” The Washington Post heard Emanuel and jammed his quote straight into a page 4 headline: “House Passes $463 Billion Spending Bill after Deleting Earmarks.”
And yet, all that any of these reporters had to do was read the goddamn text of the CR to see that there were earmarks in there, big ones, not hidden in the slightest. Of course, I wouldn’t have looked myself, had it not been for a friend of mine, a former Senate staffer turned independent budget analyst named Winslow Wheeler. A laconic, silver-haired gentleman with a salt-and-pepper mustache who seems always to have a wry smile on his face, as though living in a constant state of bemused disgust over the pork issue, Wheeler had been fired from the staff of New Mexico senator Pete Domenici in the early part of the decade for writing exposés about Defense Department pork under a pseudonym. Although he’s been out of the Senate for years now, Wheeler is still intimately familiar with the pork/earmark process—in fact, he can even claim to have helped streamline the system.