[Peace-discuss] How Congress works

[C. G. Estabrook]

[An excellent article by Matt Taibbi about what we're up
against as we try to influence the Congress on the war -- or
any other issue. --CGE]


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...

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 ... the whole
thing is an ingenious system for inhibiting progress and the
popular will. The deck is stacked just enough to make sure
that nothing ever changes. But just enough is left to
chance to make sure that hope never completely dies
out. And who knows, maybe it evolved that way for a
reason...

[The whole article, of which this is a small part, is at
<http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/7539869?pageid=rs.Politics&pageregion=single1>.]