A Shit-Show on Capitol Hill

The Dysfunction of the Legislative Branch

Readers of this site are uncommonly intelligent, as we all know. And part of that intelligence is being able to understand the forces at work on Capitol Hill as we enter yet another phase of the ongoing dumpster fire that is American representative democracy. In case any of these unusually smart people have been trekking through Amazonian jungles or have been in space for the last year, I recommend this piece from the Washington Post to bring you up to speed. Other than ignoring the lockstep voting of House Democrats, it is a pretty solid overview of things.

Speaker of the House

Long ago, when Congress “reformed” itself and committee chairmen lost their power to party leaders, the stage was set for what we have today, a Congress without tools and norms to do the business of legislating and populated by show ponies more interested in the split screen of cable news than the hard work of running a country. Because a whole new generation of legislator seeks only to be famous, rather than effective, there is no adequate means to enforce discipline within the parties, and the wingnuts of both the right and left are driving the respective agendas of their feckless parties. While this appears more pronounced in the GOP, it has been a constant feature of the Democratic legislative landscape also, as one only has to remember the efforts of Senators Sinema and Manchin to hold back the AOC coalition.

I wish I knew how all this ends. I long for “regular order” and for a “regular politics,” although I wonder if the latter even exists, or do we only identify it looking back at times that when we were in, we also considered to be shit-shows? I think about the possibilities that existed in January of 2017, when Paul Ryan was the Speaker and Mitch McConnell was the majority leader. Had there been a President with more than half a brain, a solid-conservative agenda COULD have been pursued. But that President was unconcerned with governing and getting legislation passed, that Speaker shagged ass (as a result), and that Majority Leader is now an addled minority leader in no small measure because that half-brained President suppressed GOP turnout in two Georgia runoffs while he pursued his insurrectionist agenda.

In the olden days when the GOP feigned interest in cutting spending, it at least had the guts to suggest entitlement reform as a way of doing so. Not any longer. Social security and other entitlements are not sustainable at current and predicted outlays, and our deficits ball up to debt and we cannot get out of our own way. So they try for their cuts in the 1/6 of the budget that is up for grabs. For a time, I used to think that there might be a grand bargain out there, one in which Republicans traded entitlement reform for an income tax or capital gains hike. The problem is that THIS populist brand of GOP has no desire to cut entitlements, and so “discretionary spending” represents a smaller and smaller target. Shit-show.

UVA Football

I have nothing nice to say.

A 40th Reunion

Somehow or another, forty years passed by in the blink of an eye, necessitating the gathering of the Lenape High School Indians (that’s right, Indians) Class of 1983 for a reunion. We did so Saturday evening past, thumbing our noses at the tropical storm heading the mid-Atlantic’s way. Having a hand in its organizing, I took a place athwart our party room entrance to check off attendees and give them their official wristband signifying payment. I was from a class of say, 420, and we had sixty-four attend this affair. I’m not sure how that percentage stacks up against other 40-year reunions, but it was a hardy bunch that represented a cross-section of John Hughes high school movie cliques. I think that’s the thing that surprises me each time we run one of these—in a positive way. Some people show up who didn’t really like high school. Some people loved it. Some people were (or considered themselves) part of a popular crowd, some kept to themselves. We have aged…. quite a bit….and there were people in attendance who had fought (and beat!) cancer, one who had a tumor removed from her brain recently, a few recent divorces, etc. Life goes on and takes its toll, but every five years we throw one of these parties and people seem to really enjoy them. I sure do.

L-H-S, We Know We Are The Best!

My two best friends from high school did not attend. One was at a wedding, one is a Lieutenant General in the Marine Corps, and so likely otherwise engaged. I have not remained close enough with these guys. College and the Navy and life has a lot to do with it, but the best way I can describe it is that I have been lazy. My Catherine has a wonderful way of referring to people like these. She says, “they have your stuff.” Which means, you have shared, really meaningful memories with them. I love that phrase. These two guys have my stuff, and I have theirs. We were part of the MoPed mafia of Ramblewood Farms circa 1980/81 (although I was towed astern whilst grasping a shoulder on my 10-speed as my parents would not permit me a MoPed), we were present for the very first day of MTV broadcasting, drank beer underage on the golf course and we took our girlfriends out to the pole-vault mat on spring days when track practice was canceled.

My brother Sean showed up Saturday, an interloper from the Class of 1982 but whose popularity dwarfed mine within my own class. Sean is a ginger, and he used to have a party at Christmas time each year called the “Red Annual.” These were the days of 18-year-old drinking ages in New Jersey, and I think my parents may have let him slide on the south side of that age. I’ll never forget driving to Lenape one icy winter Saturday. We had a wrestling match that night (Sean was great, I was average), and Sean was driving our F-150 pickup truck (oh, if that vehicle could tell stories…) so that I could weigh in—and see if I needed to get the rubber suit on and run some more to make weight. Well, we slid out and hit a telephone pole. Neither of us was wearing seat belts, because the truck didn’t have any (although it did have a bottle of Sambuca hidden behind the seat most of the time). He wasn’t going very fast, but I covered my head as we were going to impact and my hands shielded my head and face from a sporty impact with the windshield, which I managed to crack into a bazillion pieces. After impact, I slumped back onto the seat with my head in my hands, but I was not moving. I suppose I was gathering myself. Sean yelled “Bryan, are you alive?” And I was gathered enough to be a smart-ass, so I answered “No.”

Sean has some of my stuff too.