Congress Is Stuck in a Quantum Time Warp

WASHINGTON — There is legendary story told among basketball people about the late Marvin Barnes. (Or, alternatively, there is a story told among basketball people about the late, legendary Marvin Barnes. Either is correct.) When Barnes was playing for the old American Basketball Association’s Spirits of St. Louis, they had a game in Louisville. Now, thanks to the magic of time zones, the Spirits technically would land in St. Louis several minutes before their scheduled departure time in Louisville. Barnes took one look at the itinerary and informed team officials, “I ain’t getting on no damn time machine.”

This story comes to mind because, while you all are basking in the autumn sunshine of the first day of October, it’s still September 30 here in the U.S. Capitol, at least in that half of it occupied by the House of Representatives. The endless wrangling over the separated conjoined infrastructure twins went on far into the night on Thursday, and the House never adjourned, so technically, in that chamber it’s still September 30.

(It is, however, now October 1 in the Senate, so every time I walk down the long corridor that connects the two wings of the Capitol, I am walking down a damn time machine.)

Around about 9:45 Thursday night, Speaker Nancy Pelosi circulated a Dear Colleagues letter that implied strongly that nothing was going to happen that night. The progressives in the House, showing more gumption than many of the previous progressive blocs in that body, were not budging from their threat to tank the bipartisan infrastructure bill if they didn’t get simultaneous action on the Build Back Better reconciliation package. The negotiations on that score consisted mainly of seeing if they could get Senator Joe Manchin to go up from the $1.5 trillion figure he’d quoted as his “top line” earlier that afternoon. Thus does September 30 extend into apparent infinity.

At the same time, over in the Senate, they were debating two of the president’s nominees for positions in the executive branch: Tracy Stone-Manning to direct the Bureau of Land Management, and Saule Omarova as comptroller of the currency. What ensued was such a festival of hippie-punching and old-fashioned Red-baiting that it seemed like 1969 and 1952 had joined together in unholy wedlock. Republicans went into what my mother would call HIGH-sterics on both of them—Stone-Manning because of her past involvement with the radical environmentalist group Earth First! and Omarova because it's fun to call people Communists again.

It was a long night.

Of course, Omarova is a respected professor of law at Cornell, and a former official at the Treasury Department under George W. Bush, but that didn’t stop Senator Dan Sullivan of Alaska trying to turn her into Rosa Luxembourg. (In truth, Omarova has some policy ideas about reining in the power of banks that probably were what Sullivan was really talking about.) Sullivan was particularly giddy about the fact that Omarova, who is an immigrant from Kazakhstan, had in her youth attended the Moscow State University before the Soviet Union ate itself.

“Miss Omarova doesn’t value our system and doesn’t like banks…First, she is a 1989 graduate from Moscow State University where she was awarded the Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship. Yeah, you heard me right. I’m not talking about Moscow, Idaho…From her writings, it appears she still believes in what she learned at old Moscow U., particularly about our free market system, and Communism, and Socialism…She has advocated expanding the Federal Reserve’s mandate…How would she do this? Through, quote, a people’s ledger, a public-interest council. Sounds like a modern-day version of the system set up by the Bolsheviks.

But the real ensemble tantrum was directed toward Stone-Manning’s nomination to head the BLM. An entire battalion of Republican senators from the West got up and accused her of being a “violent ecoterrorist.” (That was Sullivan again.) Rookie Senator Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming called the choice of Stone-Manning “one of the most egregious nominations ever to receive a vote on the floor of the Senate.” Those of us who sat through the confirmation hearings of Betsy DeVos, Jeff Sessions, Brett Kavanaugh, Steve Mnuchin, and Ryan Zinke found this particularly amusing. Hell, Scott Pruitt lasted barely a year at the EPA before grifting his way back to the private sector. So Senator Lummis has some work to do building that case, I’m thinking.

I would think, Mr. President, that one of the things that would unite us would be an opposition to ecoterrorism…I’m flabbergasted. I’m aghast. I’m horrified. This is a solemn bad day for land management.

A few months ago, none of these people would vote for a bipartisan commission to look into an actual attack on the actual Capitol. Both nominees were confirmed, narrowly. The Senate went home. Meanwhile, September 30 groaned on elsewhere, into the night, into the morning, and well into the afternoon of October 1. The time machine was working splendidly.

Charles P. Pierce

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.