by Matt Taibbi
“Mr. President,” Stevens begins, eyeing the few members present. “There are only four days left in the fiscal year. The 2007 defense appropriations conference report must be signed into law by the president before Saturday at midnight. . . .”
Watching Ted Stevens spend half a trillion dollars is like watching a junkie pull a belt around his biceps with his teeth. You get the sense he could do it just as fast in the dark. When he finishes his summary—$436 billion in defense spending, including $70 billion for the Iraq “emergency”—he fucks off and leaves the hall. A few minutes later, Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma—one of the so-called honest Republicans who has clashed with his own party’s leadership on spending issues—appears in the hall and whines to the empty room about all the lavish pork projects and sheer unadulterated waste jammed into the bill. But aside from a bored-looking John Cornyn of Texas, who is acting as president pro tempore, and a couple of giggling, suit-clad pages, there is no one in the hall to listen to him.
In the sixties and seventies, congress met an average of 162 days a year. In the eighties and nineties, the average went down to 139 days. This year, the second session of the 109th Congress will set the all-time record for fewest days worked by a U.S. Congress: 93. That means that House members will collect their $165,000 paychecks for only three months of actual work.
The current Congress will not only beat but shatter the record for laziness set by the notorious “Do-Nothing” Congress of 1948, which met for a combined 252 days between the House and the Senate. This Congress—the Do-Even-Less Congress—met for 218 days, just over half a year, between the House and the Senate combined.
And even these numbers don’t come close to telling the full story. Those who actually work on the Hill will tell you that a great many of those “workdays” were shameless mail-ins, half days at best. Congress has arranged things now so that the typical workweek on the Hill begins late on Tuesday and ends just after noon on Thursday, to give members time to go home for the four-day weekend. This is borne out in the numbers. On nine of its workdays this year, the House held not a single vote—meeting for less than eleven minutes. The Senate managed to top the House’s feat, pulling off three workdays this year that lasted less than one minute. All told, a full 15 percent of the Senate’s workdays lasted under four hours. Figuring for half days, in fact, the 109th Congress probably worked almost two months less than that “Do-Nothing” Congress.
Congressional laziness comes at a high price. By leaving so many appropriations bills unpassed by the beginning of the new fiscal year, Congress forces big chunks of the government to rely on “continuing resolutions” for their funding. Why is this a problem? Because under congressional rules, CRs are funded at the lowest of three levels: the level approved by the House, the level approved by the Senate, or the level approved from the previous year. Thanks to wide discrepancies between House and Senate appropriations for social programming, CRs effectively operate as a backdoor way to slash social programs. It’s also a nice way for congressmen to get around having to pay for expensive-ass programs they voted for, such as No Child Left Behind and some of the other terminally underfunded boondoggles of the Bush years.
“The whole point of passing appropriations bills is that Congress is supposed to make small increases in programs to account for things like the increase in population,” says Adam Hughes, director of federal fiscal policy for OMB Watch, a nonpartisan watchdog group. “It’s their main job.” Instead, he says, the reliance on CRs “leaves programs underfunded.”
Instead of dealing with its chief constitutional duty—approving all government spending—Congress devotes its time to dumb bullshit. “This Congress spent a week and a half debating Terri Schiavo—it never made appropriations a priority,” says Hughes. In fact, Congress leaves itself so little time to pass the real appropriations bills that it winds up rolling them all into one giant monstrosity known as an Omnibus bill and passing it with little or no debate. Rolling eight-elevenths of all federal spending into a single bill that hits the floor a day or two before the fiscal year ends does not leave much room to check the fine print. “It allows a lot more leeway for fiscal irresponsibility,” says Hughes.
A few years ago, when Democratic staffers in the Senate were frantically poring over a massive Omnibus bill they had been handed the night before the scheduled vote, they discovered a tiny provision that had not been in any of the previous versions. The item would have given senators on the Appropriations Committee access to the private records of any taxpayer—essentially endowing a few selected hacks in the Senate with the license to snoop into the private financial information of all Americans.
“We were like, ‘What the hell is this?’” says one Democratic aide familiar with the incident. “It was the most egregious thing imaginable. It was just lucky we caught them.”
STEP THREE
LET THE PRESIDENT DO WHATEVER HE WANTS
The Constitution is very clear on the responsibility of Congress to serve as a check on the excesses of the executive branch. The House and Senate, after all, are supposed to pass all laws—the president is simply supposed to execute them. Over the years, despite some ups and downs, Congress has been fairly consistent in upholding this fundamental responsibility, regardless of which party controlled the legislative branch. Elected representatives saw themselves as beholden not to their own party or the president but to the institution of Congress itself. The model of congressional independence was Senator William Fulbright, who took on McCarthy, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon with equal vigor during the course of his long career.
“Fulbright behaved the same way with Nixon as he did with Johnson,” says Wheeler, the former Senate aide who worked on both sides of the aisle. “You wouldn’t see that today.”
In fact, the Republican-controlled Congress has created a new standard for the use of oversight powers. That standard seems to be that when a Democratic president is in power, there are no matters too stupid or meaningless to be investigated fully—but when George Bush is president, no evidence of corruption or incompetence is shocking enough to warrant congressional attention. One gets the sense that Bush would have to drink the blood of Christian babies to inspire hearings in Congress—and only then if he did it during a nationally televised State of the Union address and the babies were from Pennsylvania, where Senate Judiciary chairman Arlen Specter was running ten points behind in an election year.
The numbers bear this out. From the McCarthy era in the 1950s through the Republican takeover of Congress in 1995, no Democratic committee chairman issued a subpoena without either minority consent or a committee vote. In the Clinton years, Republicans chucked that long-standing arrangement and issued more than one thousand subpoenas to investigate alleged administration and Democratic misconduct, reviewing more than two million pages of government documents.
Guess how many subpoenas have been issued to the White House since George Bush took office? Zero—that’s right, zero, the same as the number of open rules debated this year; two fewer than the number of appropriations bills passed on time.
And the cost? Republicans in the Clinton years spent more than $35 million investigating the administration. The total amount of taxpayer funds spent, when independent counsels are taken into account, was more than $150 million. Included in that number was $2.2 million to investigate former HUD secretary Henry Cisneros for lying about improper payments he made to a mistress. In contrast, today’s Congress spent barely half a million dollars investigating the outright fraud and government bungling that followed Hurricane Katrina, the largest natural disaster in American history.
“Oversight is one of the most important functions of Congress—perhaps more important than legislating,” says Representative Henry Waxman. “And the Republicans have completely failed at it. I think they decided that they were going to be good Republicans first and good legislators second.”
As the ranking minority member of the Government Reform Committee, Waxman has earned a reputation as the chief Democratic muckraker, obsessively cranking out reports on official misconduct and incompetence. Among them is a lengthy document detailing all of the wrongdoing by the Bush administration that should have been investigated—and would have been, in any other era. The litany of fishy behavior left uninvestigated in the Bush years includes the manipulation of intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, the mistreatment of Iraqi detainees, the leak of Valerie Plame’s CIA status, the award of Halliburton contracts, the White House response to Katrina, secret NSA wiretaps, Dick Cheney’s energy task force, the withholding of Medicare cost estimates, the administration’s politicization of science, contract abuses at Homeland Security, and lobbyist influence at the EPA.
Waxman notes that the failure to investigate these issues has actually hurt the president, leaving potentially fatal flaws in his policies unexamined even by those in his own party. Without proper congressional oversight, small disasters like the misuse of Iraq intelligence have turned into huge, festering, unsolvable fiascoes like the Iraq occupation. Republicans in Congress who stonewalled investigations of the administration “thought they were doing Bush a favor,” says Waxman. “But they did him the biggest disservice of all.”
Congress has repeatedly refused to look at any aspect of the war. In 2003, Republicans refused to allow a vote on a bill introduced by Waxman that would have established an independent commission to review the false claims Bush made in asking Congress to declare war on Iraq. That same year, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Porter Goss, refused to hold hearings on whether the administration had forged evidence of the nuclear threat allegedly posed by Iraq. A year later the chair of the Government Reform Committee, Tom Davis, refused to hold hearings on new evidence casting doubt on the “nuclear tubes” cited by the Bush administration before the war. Senator Pat Roberts, who pledged to issue a Senate Intelligence Committee report after the 2004 election on whether the Bush administration had misled the public before the invasion, changed his mind after the president won reelection. “I think it would be a monumental waste of time to replow this ground any further,” Roberts said.
Sensenbrenner has done his bit to squelch any debate over Iraq. He refused a request by John Conyers and more than fifty other Democrats for hearings on the famed “Downing Street Memo,” the internal British document that stated that Bush had “fixed” the intelligence about the war, and he was one of three committee chairs who rejected requests for hearings on the abuse of Iraqi detainees. Despite an international uproar over Abu Ghraib, Congress spent only twelve hours on hearings on the issue. During the Clinton administration, by contrast, the Republican Congress spent 140 hours investigating the president’s alleged misuse of his Christmas-card greeting list.
“You talk to many Republicans in Congress privately, and they will tell you how appalled they are by the administration’s diminishment of civil liberties and the constant effort to keep fear alive,” says Turley, who testified as a constitutional scholar in favor of the Clinton impeachment. “Yet those same members slavishly vote with the White House. What’s most alarming about the 109th has been the massive erosion of authority in Congress. There has always been partisanship, but this is different. Members have become robotic in the way they vote.”
Perhaps the most classic example of failed oversight in the Bush era came in a little-publicized hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee held on February 13, 2003—just weeks before the invasion of Iraq. The hearing offered senators a rare opportunity to grill Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and top Pentagon officials on a wide variety of matters, including the fairly important question of whether they even had a fucking plan for the open-ended occupation of a gigantic hostile foreign population halfway around the planet. This was the biggest bite that Congress would have at the Iraq apple before the war, and given the gravity of the issue it should have been a beast of a hearing. But it wasn’t to be.
In a meeting that lasted two hours and fifty-three minutes, only one question was asked about the military’s readiness on the eve of the invasion. Senator John Warner, the committee’s venerable and powerful chairman, asked General Richard Myers if the United States was ready to fight simultaneously in both Iraq and North Korea, if necessary.
Myers answered, “Absolutely.”
And that was it. The entire exchange lasted fifteen seconds. The rest of the session followed a pattern familiar to anyone who has watched a hearing on C-Span. The members, when they weren’t reading or chatting with one another, used their time with witnesses almost exclusively to address parochial concerns revolving around pork projects in their own districts. Warner set the tone in his opening remarks; after announcing that U.S. troops preparing to invade Iraq could count on his committee’s “strongest support,” the senator from Virginia quickly turned to the question of how the war would affect the budget for navy shipbuilding, which, he said, was not increasing “as much as we wish.” Not that there’s a huge navy shipyard in Newport News, Virginia, or anything.
Other senators followed suit. Daniel Akaka was relatively uninterested in Iraq but asked about reports that Korea might have a missile that could reach his home state of Hawaii. David Pryor of Arkansas used his time to tout the wonders of military bases in Little Rock and Pine Bluff. When the senators weren’t eating up their allotted time in this fashion, they were usually currying favor with the generals. Warner himself nicely encapsulated the obsequious tone of the session when he complimented Rumsfeld for having his shit so together on the war.
“I think your response reflects that we have given a good deal of consideration,” Warner said. “That we have clear plans in place and are ready to proceed.” We all know how that turned out.
STEP FOUR
SPEND, SPEND, SPEND
There is a simple reason that members of Congress don’t waste their time providing any oversight of the executive branch: there’s nothing in it for them. “What they’ve all figured out is that there’s no political payoff in oversight,” says Wheeler, the former congressional staffer. “But there’s a big payoff in pork.”
When one considers that Congress has forsaken hearings and debate, conspired to work only three months a year, completely ditched its constitutional mandate to provide oversight, and passed very little in the way of meaningful legislation, the question arises: What do they do?
The answer is easy: they spend. When Bill Clinton left office, the nation had a budget surplus of $236 billion. Today, thanks to Congress, the budget is $296 billion in the hole. This year, more than 65 percent of all the money borrowed in the entire world will be borrowed by America, a statistic fueled by the speed-junkie spending habits of our supposedly “fiscally conservative” Congress. It took forty-two presidents before George W. Bush to borrow $1 trillion; under Bush, Congress has more than doubled that number in six years. And more often than not, we are borrowing from countries the sane among us would prefer not to be indebted to. The United States shells out $77 billion a year in interest to foreign creditors, including payment on the $300 billion we currently owe China.
What do they spend that money on? In the age of Jack Abramoff, that is an ugly question even to contemplate. But let’s take just one bill, the so-called energy bill, a big, hairy, favor-laden bitch of a law that started out as the wet dream of Dick Cheney’s energy task force and spent four long years leaving grease tracks on every set of palms in the Capitol before finally becoming law in 2005.
Like a lot of laws in the Bush era, it was crafted with virtually no input from the Democrats, who were excluded from the conference process. And during the course of the bill’s gestation period we were made aware that many of its provisions were more or less openly for sale, as in the case of a small electric utility from Kansas called Westar Energy.
Westar wanted a provision f
avorable to its business inserted in the bill—and in an internal company memo it acknowledged that members of Congress had requested Westar donate money to their campaigns in exchange for the provision. The members included former Louisiana congressman Billy Tauzin and current Energy and Commerce chairman Joe Barton of Texas. “They have made this request in lieu of contributions made to their own campaigns,” the memo noted. The total amount of Westar’s contributions was $58,200.
Keep in mind, that number—fifty-eight grand—was for a single favor. The energy bill was loaded with them. Between 2001 and the passage of the bill, energy companies donated $115 million to federal politicians, with 75 percent of the money going to Republicans. When the bill finally passed, it contained $6 billion in subsidies for the oil industry, much of which was funneled through a company with ties to Majority Leader Tom DeLay. It included an exemption from the Safe Drinking Water Act for companies that use a methane-drilling technique called “hydraulic fracturing,” one of the widest practitioners of which is Halliburton. It included billions in subsidies for the construction of new coal plants and billions more in loan guarantees to enable the coal and nuclear industries to borrow money at bargain-basement interest rates.
Favors for campaign contributors, exemptions for polluters, shifting the costs of private projects on to the public—these are the specialties of this Congress. Its members seldom miss an opportunity to impoverish the states we live in and up the bottom line of their campaign contributors. All this time—while Congress did nothing about Iraq, Katrina, wiretapping, Mark Foley’s boy-madness, or anything else of import—it has been all about pork, all about political favors, all about budget “earmarks” set aside for expensive and often useless projects in their own districts. In 2000, Congress passed 6,073 earmarks; by 2005 that number had risen to 15,877. They got better at it every year. It’s the one thing they’re good at.