The Lingering Stench Of Clean Bills From A Nose Blind Congress
Congressional leaders in March of 2020. Phot by the office of Kevin McCarthy, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
They call it nose blindness.
It is the ability of someone to not recognize an odor out of familiarity with it. Think of a teenager no longer realizing their uncleaned room has developed an aroma besides just that of teen spirit. Or the unbathed person no longer able to appreciate the redolence of their presence. Or the factory worker no longer paying any mind to the noxious fumes of the industrialized world they function in day in and day out.
Nose blindness is both a biological input and a sensory processing type of situation for the human brain:
Pamela Dalton has been studying nose blindness for more than 20 years. She is a cognitive psychologist with the Monell Chemical Senses Center and she has an explanation for why we go nose blind.
According to Dalton, when you introduce a new scent into your home, your odor receptors pick up the new odorant molecules and send the information to your brain’s olfactory bulb which is part of the limbic system. If the scent is understood by the brain to not be dangerous, such as a pleasant scent as opposed to a “dangerous” scent such as a fire or rotting meat, then the nose receptors shut off. When the nose receptors shut off, the scent becomes less intense. The theory about this is that the scent is not dangerous so the brain does not need to pay attention to it. After a while you become less and less aware of the non-dangerous scents in your own home.
So, it’s fair to say that our congress critters are just being their well-trained Pavlovian selves in that they can say things like this with a straight face and not a hint of self-aware irony:
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Democrats are introducing a stopgap bill and could take action as early as Wednesday, two days after GOP senators blocked a funding measure that both averted a government shutdown and suspended the debt limit. Any proposal addressing the latter has been a non-starter for Republicans, who have warned that Democrats have to hike the debt limit without relying on their support.
Known as a “clean” continuing resolution, the measure maintains current funding levels through December 3 and includes $6.3 billion for relocation efforts for Afghan refugees, as well as $28.6 billion for disaster assistance following a spate of devastating hurricanes and wildfires.
“We can approve this measure quickly and send it to the House so it can reach the president’s desk before funding expires midnight tomorrow,” Schumer said in remarks on the Senate floor. “With so many critical issues to address, the last thing the American people need right now is a government shutdown. This proposal will prevent one from happening.”
Good to know they will clean their room by the end of next week to keep from the consequences; just please don’t punish them for the preceding months of inactivity on the deadline they knew was coming the whole time.
We really are governed by suspended adolescents.
But like an unruly teenager, our dysfunctional congress is only partly to blame. The rest of the blame lies on us, the American people, because they are just doing what we have conditioned them to do by our own omission of not caring about the basic functions of congress. Functions like passing budget and spending measures, their constitutionally designated primary purpose, on the regular to keep the country running. The fact that we now have to delineate “clean bills” as an anomaly of legislation process that does what it says it is going to do and nothing else ought to be the clue how rancid the aroma of our lawmaking has become.
Congress is nose blind to the brinksmanship legislation they do every fiscal year and every time the debt limit comes up because they no longer sense any electoral danger in not doing the bare minimum of their actual jobs. The power of the purse is supposed to be one of the great counter-balances in the separation of powers built into the American system of government. But this great responsibility is being treated by the current generation of congressional leaders the way an immature teen takes parental car keys and goes off on a joy ride before the promised cleaning of the room. We have low expectations for our congress, but perhaps they could at least stop driving the United States government like they stole it. But bright, shiny, big ticket omnibus bills (the very opposite of clean bills), and emergency legislating with the gun of circumstances put to the country’s head are far easier to pass than the stodgy, thankless, and not trending on social media work of just passing clean bills. Clean bills that do mundane things like keeping this, greatest experiment in a free people self governing the world has ever seen, going a bit longer.
If they made all legislation to be “clean bills”, imagine what a happy, shiny, greener world we would have then. Drama free politics, content pundits, unicorns that double as soft-serve ice cream machines for the masses. World peace, achieved at last. Then they would not be confessing to the world their unclean methods and immature nature by omission. But this group isn’t going to do that. Unless we make them, or at least electorally scare them enough that they are no long nose blind to their reckless ways and immature legislative habits.
That’ll be the day.
I’ve been a fed 19 years. We have yet to have “regular order appropriations.” And since we can’t terminate programs or start new one under a CR, we end up with weeks to do months to years worth of work once we do get an appropriation. To make it worse, the Congressional staff generally have all the appropriations bills written and ready to go within a month of the release of the President’s Budget Request. Which means their own bosses keep trashing their good work.
And you are 100% correct – they don’t fear reprisals for the brinksmanship. We can’t put them on a performance improvement plan for failing at their primary duty. Believe me – its maddening.Report
California used to be chronically unable to pass a budget and had regular crises of exactly this sort.
Until the Republicans were driven from power. Now we pass bills and budgets regularly.
Can we please stop with the “Congress is broken” stuff?
It simply isn’t true. We have one party, one party only, that is obstructing. One party and one party only that has no desire to govern, and seeks only power.
In a healthy democracy, every party will have its Manchins and Sinemas, their cranks and rogues. But today the Republican Senators and Congressmen are all, every one of them, cranks and rogues whose only agenda is grievance, where it isn’t grift.
There is no Republican counterproposal on the budget, no offer of compromise because there is nothing they want, except to inflict pain on the American public in hopes of gaining power from the resulting chaos.Report
Well said.Report
I am going to chime in with Chip here. Who is this we? It is true that there are a handful of Democratic representatives along with Manchin and Sinema willing to through spanners in everything because they are stuck in the 1990s triangulating past and/or are working for some principals that are hard to ascertain but are likely corporate favors. Kathleen Rice and Sinema both campaigned in 2018 on allowing the government to negotiate drug prices but now are stating not so fast. Manchin is a just a true believer in stinginess at this point even though the 3.5 trillion dollar stimulus was very popular in West Virginia from what I read.
The GOP are nihilists who are denied agency by the press and a good chunk of the population and always looking to score a partisan advantage point.Report
I find it odd that you and Chip believe that your certainty that none of the opponents of the $3.5 T (actually $5 trillion if all of the provisions are extended to the full ten years) bill could possibly have any good reasons for opposing it reflects worse on the opponents than on you.
If the only reasons you can imagine that anyone might disagree with on this issue are graft or being a cartoon villain, you can’t possibly have an informed opinion.Report
The bill – the extended one – runs $500 Billion a year. The not extended one runs $350 Billion a year. We spend over $700 Billion a year on defense. We could raise $168 Billion a year if we actually enforced our tax laws. We’d get $150 Billion a year if we revoked Trump’s tax cuts. So the $350 Billion a year version is easy to pay for.
But its opponents don’t want to do those two things to pay for stuff that their own constituents will benefit from greatly. So far their biggest push back is we don’t want socialism – as if socialism now means rebuilding crumbling bridges, expanding rural broadband, and ensuring we have an adequately large and adequately paid workforce to care for our seniors. They don’t want to do those two things to move our economy away from fossil fuels (I’m looking at you Joe Manchin). And mostly they don’t want to do it because, with t he tax cut roll back, they would have to admit that after over 40 years of tax cuts, Trickle Down doesn’t.
So yeah, either they are pursuing power for its own sake, or they have become cartoon caricatures. They sure as hell aren’t leaders, and they sure as hell aren’t offering any possibility of compromise that might benefit their own constituents, much less anyone else.
Saul got it right:
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