When did “averted” become the highest praise we offer Congress?
I went to a dinner Tuesday in Kalorama — the kind of room where the place cards are handwritten and someone always mentions, casually, that they used to clerk for somebody. The host had cued up C-SPAN on the kitchen monitor with the sound off. The House was voting on the appropriations measure. The lobbyist next to me — bipartisan, as they all are now — watched the tally climb and said, without irony, “Good. We bought ourselves six weeks.”
Six weeks. He said it like a man describing a layaway plan.
I should explain. The bill the House passed Wednesday is not a budget. It is not, in any meaningful sense, an act of governing. It is a permission slip we have learned to write to ourselves every few months so that the air traffic controllers continue to show up and the meat inspectors continue to inspect meat. We call it a continuing resolution because “we couldn’t agree on anything but we’d like the lights to stay on” does not fit on a chyron.
My sister-in-law Judy, who has worked at the National Archives for twenty-two years, told me last fall that she now keeps a go-bag at her desk. Not for a fire. For a shutdown. She has been furloughed four times in her career. She has stopped buying green bananas in January.
This is the part where I am supposed to assign blame to a party, and I will disappoint you. Both parties have discovered that the actual budget process — the one with hearings and markups and floor debate stretching across the calendar — is politically suicidal, because it requires somebody to vote, on the record, for a specific number next to a specific program. The continuing resolution requires no such courage. It funds everything at last year’s levels and dares the other side to be the one who turned off the lights.
Eliza — you’ve met her in this column before, she runs a foundation now after a stint at State — leaned over the branzino and asked, almost dreamily, whether anyone at the table could name the last time Congress passed all twelve appropriations bills on time. A woman to my left, a former staffer for a senator I won’t embarrass by naming, said, “1996.” She said it the way you’d identify a fossil.
The bipartisan lobbyist refilled his wine. He told us, smiling, that his clients prefer it this way. Long-term budgets create predictability, and predictability is for civilians. The CR economy — his phrase, not mine — keeps everyone on retainer. You don’t need a lobbyist to maintain a status quo nobody is interested in disturbing. You need a lobbyist to make sure your particular line item survives the next six-week scramble.
I asked him what happens if, one of these times, the can finally hits the wall instead of getting kicked further down it. He examined his cufflink. He said: “Margaret, the wall is the next CR.”
I came home and watched the cable wraps describe Wednesday’s vote as a “win for stability.” Stability. We have agreed, collectively, to call the absence of governing “stability” because the alternative word would require somebody to do something about it.
A republic that funds itself in six-week increments is not a republic that is planning to be here in ten years. But we are not supposed to say that at dinner. At dinner we are supposed to say “averted,” and pass the wine, and ask about the children.
We asked about the children. The branzino was excellent. Judy bought bananas the next morning that won’t be ripe until March.