A
month inside the house of horrors that is Congress


Congress isn't the steady assembly line of consensus policy ideas it's
sold as, but a kind of permanent emergency in which a majority of
members work day and night to burgle the national treasure and burn the
Constitution. A largely castrated minority tries, Alamo-style, to slow
them down – but in the end spends most of its time beating calculated
retreats and making loose plans to fight another day.

It
was a fairy-tale political season for George W. Bush, and it seemed like no one
in the world noticed. Amid bombs in London, bloodshed in Iraq, a missing blonde in Aruba and a scandal curling up on
the doorstep of Karl Rove, Bush's Republican Party quietly celebrated a
massacre on Capitol Hill. Two of the most long-awaited legislative wet dreams
of the Washington Insiders Club – an energy bill and a much-delayed highway
bill – breezed into law. One mildly nervous evening was all it took to pass
through the House the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), for years
now a primary strategic focus of the battle-in-Seattle activist scene. And
accompanied by scarcely a whimper from the Democratic opposition, a second
version of the notorious USA Patriot Act passed triumphantly through both
houses of Congress, with most of the law being made permanent this time.

Bush's
summer bills were extraordinary pieces of legislation, broad in scope,
transparently brazen and audaciously indulgent. They gave an energy industry
drowning in the most obscene profits in its history billions of dollars in
subsidies and tax breaks, including $2.9 billion for the coal industry. The
highway bill set new standards for monstrous and indefensibly wasteful
spending, with Congress allocating $100,000 for a single traffic light in Canoga Park, California, and $223 million for the
construction of a bridge linking the mainland an Alaskan island with a
population of just fifty.

It
was a veritable bonfire of public money, and it raged with all the brilliance
of an Alabama book-burning. And what
fueled it all were the little details you never heard about. The energy bill
alone was 1,724 pages long. By the time the newspapers reduced this Tolstoyan
monster to the size of a single headline announcing its passage, only a very
few Americans understood that it was an ambitious giveaway to energy interests.
But the drama of the legislative process is never in the broad strokes but in
the bloody skirmishes and power plays that happen behind the scenes.

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