Cancerous Politics
This is why people hate politics: A debate that sprung up in the final hours before lawmakers approved a slapdash budget bill on Friday provides a tidy illustration of the performative bullshit that governs Congress these days.
Here’s what happened: After the initial 1,500-page continuing resolution ran aground in the House on Thursday, Republican leaders began tossing parts of the bill overboard in the hopes that a lighter version would get enough votes to keep the government running until March. That effort succeeded on Friday. Left behind, however, was a provision that extended $12.6 million in annual pediatric cancer research funding through 2031.
Democrats and the media pounced. “Elon Killed the Budget Deal. Cancer Research for Kids Was Collateral Damage” is how The Bulwark decided to frame the story, in a post that was widely picked up.
In reality, the House passed the pediatric cancer research bill with a near-unanimous vote in March—yes, nine months ago. That bill had been sitting, untouched, in the Senate ever since.
Untouched, that is, until moments after the continuing resolution—sans childhood cancer provisions—passed the Senate. At that point, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) did what he could have done at any point over the past nine months: call up the standalone House-passed bill for a vote. It passed easily.
It was a lot of sound and partisan fury over nothing. A bill that practically every member of Congress supported was passed, as you’d expect. Can we please save the hackish, hair-on-fire, people-will-die reactions for actual spending cuts?
Lame duck: If you followed last week’s negotiations over the budget bill, you might have been left with the mistaken impression that President-elect Donald Trump had already taken the oath of office. It was Trump’s late-breaking demands about the debt ceiling, among other things, that drove much of the drama.
President Joe Biden, meanwhile, was utterly absent. “No one seemed to be looking to Biden for answers—and the lame-duck president gave no indication he had any desire to provide them,” is how Politico described the situation.
Outgoing presidents rarely hold much sway over congressional action—but Biden going out with a whimper on the final policymaking battle of his career seems a fitting end to the year in which America’s oldest-ever president definitively lost his fight against Father Time.
Even more MIA than Biden: Rep. Kay Granger (R–Texas) didn’t vote on the continuing resolution that passed in the House on Friday night. In fact, she hasn’t voted on any bill for several months—because she’s apparently been living in a memory care and assisted living facility near Dallas.
That’s the bonkers discovery that The Dallas Express made by doing some terrific shoe-leather reporting about Granger’s extended absence from Congress. After the story was published on Saturday, Granger’s son told Axios that the 14-term congresswoman has been “having some dementia issues late in the year.”
Granger did not seek reelection this year and will officially retire from Congress when the current term ends on January 3. Even so, this incident should be another neon warning sign about the flaws of gerontocracy—a problem that plagues not only America but many of the world’s biggest democracies, as The Economist detailed this week
Article from Reason.com
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