The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire

by Matt Taibbi

  WHEN THE MARKUP PROCESS was finished, Barton trotted to the Rules Committee, stopping in the press lounge on the way to give an impromptu presser about the exciting new energy bill. Have to keep the public informed!

  I was there: I was curious to see how he’d handle what would doubtless be rigorous questioning. But alas, most of the questions involved asking Barton why it is that the Democrats were so hung up on state-directed solutions to the gas-supply crisis, to which Barton—seated comfortably, with his legs crossed, in an informal posture on the sofa in the middle of the lounge—replied that he just didn’t know how it was that the Democrats still didn’t understand the realities of market economics.

  The crowd of reporters nodded and jotted down Barton’s answer in their notebooks. The House press lounge is a very strange place. Normally, any place where large numbers of reporters congregate can be counted on to be a filthy, paper-strewn human barnyard, full of foul language, discarded pizza crusts, and atrocious hygiene. But the House press lounge has a dress code—every man in a necktie, women in business casual at worst—and decorum is fairly rigidly enforced. One of my first experiences in Congress was a chewing out by a female reporter who caught me in the lounge without a tie on and told me to “have some respect.”

  “For what?” I’d said.

  “For democracy,” she hissed.

  In any case, this unsmiling crew crowded around Barton now and copied down his gospel. The good chairman made it almost all the way through the press conference without answering a really tough question—until, finally, a New York Times reporter hit him with an unfriendly one.

  “Chairman Barton,” he said, “your opponents say you’re just exploiting the hurricane to do what you haven’t been able to do in years past. What do you say to that?”

  Barton smiled, sighed, then shook his head, waited a moment, and raised an index finger dramatically. “Let me tell y’all something,” he said finally, after a long pause. “One thing I’m not…is an exploiter!”

  I thought he was going to go on from there, but he didn’t—that was the answer. He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms triumphantly.

  A reporter next to me jotted down in her notes:

  One thing not = exploiter

  The moment past, Barton smiled and took the next question. Soon after that the press left for the day, and Barton grinned, picked up his briefcase, and crossed the hall to confront the Rules Committee.

  THESE DAYS they’re in charge, masters of their domain, but back then, the four Democratic members of the Rules Committee were some of the very saddest politicians in Washington, victims of some of the most severe ritualistic political abuse Congress has seen in quite some time. Over the years, the role of the minority party in Congress and in particular this committee has decreased steadily, to the point where the year 2005—this year—would become the first time in congressional history in which no “open” rules would be sent to the floor from the Rules chamber. In layman’s terms, this meant that the Rules Committee this year would not send a single rule to the floor that would be freely debated, and the number of Democratic amendments would be smaller than ever. With dictatorial Rules chair David Dreier commanding the committee with iron discipline, the roles of the four Democrats on the committee—Louise Slaughter of New York, Doris Matsui of California, Alcee Hastings of Florida, and Jim McGovern of Massachusetts—would be reduced, quite literally, to bitching and moaning as loudly as possible during those few Rules hearings that would be held during daylight hours. That was the only job the Democrats had that year: whine and bitch with maximum pathos, in the vain hope that someone in the audience might notice exactly how disgusting and irrelevant the legislation being sent to the floor actually was.

  “It’s basically hopeless,” said McGovern. “Basically we don’t have much room to do anything, but occasionally, if we’re really pathetic, we can shame them into cutting back a little.”

  McGovern is the House standup comedian. Stocky, bespectacled, and bald, he looks like a veteran character actor, the kind who might play a sitcom hardware store owner, or the cuckolded murder suspect in a Law and Order episode. The House is full of amateur comics, but McGovern is one of the Hill’s few true masters of the one-liner; this makes him ideally suited for this saddest of congressional jobs. For this reason the city of Worcester, Massachusetts, can be proud of McGovern, who has found more ways to say “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me” than any other congressman in the Bush years.

  On the day the gasoline bill goes to Rules, all four Democrats are in place right from the start and all four are antsy, tapping pencils against their table places on the left-hand side of the room. I slide into the back row, a few minutes before Barton strolls in to take his seat in the witness chair. None of the reporters from the briefing across the hall in the press lounge a few minutes ago have bothered to come in here. There are three rows of chairs in the gallery, and the crowd looks mostly to be made up of aides to the day’s witnesses, who include Barton and a few other members of the Energy and Commerce Committee. As usual, the Rules hearing is strictly an insider deal, no C-SPAN cameras, no reporters, nothing. The lone civilians look to be me and a pair of bloggers.

  Dreier, the chairman, is, as usual, not chairing the hearing. Like Charlie in Charlie’s Angels, the well-dressed Dreier (who in 2004 won the prestigious Roy Cohn Award, given by gay activists to the closeted politician most hostile to gay political interests) tends to play up his scary-villain rep by remaining off camera as much as possible. In his place he usually trots out the committee’s resident ballcarrier, Lincoln Diaz-Balart of Florida. A nephew of Fidel Castro and a faithful devotee of the cologne-soaked car-salesman look popular among some southern congressmen, Diaz-Balart is one of the House’s all-time blowhards, a guy who before the Republicans took control of the House made a career blasting the Democrats for not allowing open-rule bills to reach the House floor. “You know what the closed rule means,” he said, back in 1992. “It means no discussion, no amendments. That is profoundly undemocratic.”

  That was then. Thirteen years later, Diaz-Balart is presiding over a Rules Committee that no longer allows any open rules, but the lack of democracy doesn’t seem to bother him now. Not much does. The Floridian seems happy most of the time, and never happier than when he can kick off a Rules hearing with some good old-fashioned ball-washing:

  “I just want to commend Mr. Barton for his continuing hard work on very tough issues and hard work in an important way focused on this issue close to recent national disasters, the refineries in this country,” he said as Barton slid into his seat. “I was really shocked [he put his hand over his heart] to see that as we quadrupled our gross domestic product we have not built a single refinery. If that is not an ultimate example of sitting on our superpower laurels, I don’t think anything is. We have to address these issues if we are to continue to be the strongest and most dominant economy in the world. And I just…I want to commend the chairman for his hard work!”

  “Thank you,” said Barton.

  Diaz-Balart opened the floor for questioning. One by one, the Democrats listed all of the reasons this emergency refinery hurricane bill had nothing to do with gas, refineries, or the hurricane. Slaughter, the Democrat from Buffalo, read Barton a quote from the Washington Post noting that the United States has not built a refinery since 1976 and that most oil executives feel the number of refineries needed to be reduced, not increased. She also quoted the chief refining director at the American Petroleum Institute, Edward Murphy, who said that there was no shortage of capacity.

  “Do you think that passing the bill will change their minds and they will suddenly want to build refineries?” Slaughter asked. “Or are they going to take the less regulations on Clean Air and run and be happy?”

  Barton smiled and twirled a pen in front of him. “Well, I want to reemphasize we are not reducing the environmental requirements on a refinery,” he said. Then, seeming inspired to add an additional comment, he
straightened up in his chair and clasped his hands in a prayerlike posture.

  “I think it is a good thing that we have environmental law,” he said piously. “And I think that it is a good thing to enforce it.”

  A few of the Republicans on the panel chuckled. The Democrats all rolled their eyes. Barton’s facial expression was deadpan, his mouth a completely level plane. Environmental law is good. That was a hell of line, under the circumstances.

  McGovern started in next. He returned to the theme of the bill having nothing to do with gas prices or emergency relief and noted that oil companies in America had closed thirty refineries in the past three decades. He also raised a question about a provision of the bill that would allow oil companies to receive public land giveaways—closed military bases from the government that could be handed over in order to build, in theory anyway, new refineries. It was my understanding of the bill that the land transfer could be accomplished by means of a simple decree by the governor of the state in question, and McGovern noted that as well, complaining that “closed military bases could be given to oil companies to build refineries without allowing any public input.”

  “That’s not true,” retorted Barton.

  “What would be the public input, other than the governor?” McGovern asked.

  Barton took a deep breath.

  “Well,” he said, “on the federal land, the president is against a particular piece of federal property, which could be a military base as a particular. Then you go and you have the open meetings and all of that and you put it out for bid. You solicit requests for an RFP. Then again you know the hope is that by expediting the permitting, by not changing the requirements of the permit, just by expediting the decision-making process that you get enough certainty into the process that the people that have the capital will come forward and want to utilize it.”

  Everybody in the room looked around, wondering what the hell Barton just said.

  “But,” Barton added, smiling, “we are not short-circuiting any existing regulatory requirements.”

  The blogger guy next to me leaned over.

  “What the fuck did all that mean?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  Neither, apparently, was McGovern. “Um,” he said, “let me move on to my next question…”

  One by one, the Democrats whaled away at Barton, and the chairman just stayed cool and deadpan the whole time. The ranking Democrat on Barton’s Energy and Commerce Committee, the elderly John Dingell of Michigan, showed up and testified basically that the bill was a bunch of bullshit.

  “I had the president of one of the major oil companies in my office,” he said, glancing over at Barton, who turned his head away. “I said, ‘What do you need to make for more oil refinery construction? To encourage it?’ He said, ‘Well, we don’t really need more refinery construction, and the reason is that we lose money on refineries. The refineries are a necessary thing to get rid of the oil that we produce, but not really useful and valuable for a money-making system.’”

  Dingell cleared his throat. “Now that doesn’t say anything bad about the oil companies,” he said. “But it does tell you that this bill ain’t much, and it does tell you that this bill is probably a political exercise.”

  Barton shrugged at all this.

  “I mean, you know, reasonable people can disagree,” he said. Then, again smiling suddenly, he added, “I don’t really have an answer for you other than, I feel your pain.”

  Again chuckles from the Republican members. Eyebrows all over the room raised. It took serious balls to joke about pain with putrefied, gas-filled bodies still floating in New Orleans and refugees still spilling out of the Superdome by the thousands.

  For a short time the committee room was actually quiet, as if a moment of silence needed to be held in honor of this new low.

  “Wow,” the blogger whispered.

  “Awesome,” I agreed.

  A moment later McGovern jumped back in, noting that Barton’s bill contained a maximum fine for price gouging of $11,000 per day, which of course was meaningless to a billion-dollar oil company but significant to an independent service-station owner. All the bill did was force independent operators to keep their prices low, which you had to figure was really more of a favor to the oil companies than to the customer. Beyond that, it did nothing whatsoever to lower gas prices in the wake of the hurricane or to lower heating-oil prices in the northern states, which were staring at a long winter of shortages.

  “In New England we are headed for a cold winter, and people need relief now,” McGovern said. “Your bill does nothing that I can see now or in the near future, and that is why it puzzles me why this bill had to be rushed here, why there couldn’t have been extensive hearings, and why there couldn’t have been more input leading up to this.”

  Barton shrugged at all this. He shrugged more when there were more complaints from Dingell and Slaughter about the Clean Air rollbacks and the failure of the committee to allow Democratic substitutes and the failure of the bill, in general, to do anything that could be classified as a legislative response to a natural disaster. Finally Barton seemed to get fed up with all of this criticism and took a stand. He noted again that people at the pump in Texas were bugging him about gas prices.

  “They say, What are you going to do about this? And I say, We’re going to start this process,” he said. “And they say, What are you going to do this week? I’m paying fifty dollars twice a week. And I understand that. But in a market economy you’ve got to start somewhere.”

  He cleared his throat, smiled slightly at the corners of his mouth, and pressed on.

  “You know, there was a famous British scientist named Faraday,” he said. “And he was once showing Queen Victoria one of the first electric lamps in Great Britain…”

  “Where’s he going with this?” the blogger whispered.

  I shrugged. Barton continued:

  “And she looked at it and said, Well, that is a novelty, but of what use is it? And he said, Your Highness, of what use is a newborn baby?”

  Barton made an emphatic gesture, half throwing up his hands, as if to say, You feel me? And then he abruptly stopped talking.

  The room fell silent; a few gasped.

  “Wait,” the blogger said. “I missed that.”

  “It’s a newborn baby,” I whispered.

  “What is?” he asked.

  “The bill,” I said. “It’s a useless piece of shit, but so is a newborn baby.”

  “Oh.” He nodded. “Wow.”

  “Wow,” I agreed.

  A few minutes later, Barton folded up his stuff and left the room. Not long after, the hearing adjourned. The Dems waddled out the front door, like a bunch of sad baby ducks without a mother. Diaz-Balart disappeared through a back door, the Republicans following him, to hammer out the final product.

  THREE

  THE LONGEST THREE DAYS OF MY LIFE

  Do you seek to live a “more abundant life”? Are you tired of dealing with emotions and pain that seem to plague your daily interactions—especially with those you love? Are you looking for resolutions to relational issues in your family?

  Through the Government of Twelve Encounter Weekends conducted by the Ministry of Reconciliation Department you can find answers to these questions. The wounds of our past will dictate the quality of our life today.

  —CORNERSTONE CHURCH WEB SITE

  I pulled into the church parking lot a little after 6:00 p.m., at more or less the last possible minute. The previous half hour or so I’d spent dawdling in my car outside a Goodwill department store off Route 410, clinging to some inane sports talk show piping over my car radio—anything to hold off my plunge into Religion.

  But there was no turning back now. Besides, where would I go? Back to Washington? The whole purpose of that exercise had been to see exactly how little our national politicians gave a shit about the People, a group whom I presumably felt sympathy for. That shouldn’t change now,
despite the fact that I was currently feeling like I’d rather gouge my eyes out than go on to spend a long weekend in Hill Country praying to Jesus with my fellow man. I sighed and pulled myself out of my car.

  There was an old-fashioned white school bus in front of the church entrance, with a puddle of heavyset people milling around its swinging door. Some of these were carrying blankets and sleeping bags. My heart, already pounding, skipped a few extra beats.

  The church circulars had said nothing about bringing bedding. Why did I need bedding? What else had I missed?

  “Excuse me,” I said, walking up to an in-charge-looking man with a name tag who was standing near the front of the bus. “I see everyone has blankets. I didn’t bring any. Is this going to be a problem?”

  The man was about five foot one and had glassy eyes. He looked up at me and smiled queerly.

  “Name?” he said.

  “Collins,” I said. “Matthew Collins.”

  He scanned his clipboard, found my name on the appropriate sheet of paper, and x-ed me out with a highlighter. “Don’t worry, Matthew,” he said, resting his hand on my shoulder. “A wonderful woman named Martha is going to take care of you at the ranch. You just tell her what you need when you get there.”

  I nodded, glancing at his hand, which was still on my shoulder. He waved me into the bus.

  I had been attending the church for weeks, but this was really my first day of school. No more fleeting conversations in the church alcove. No more furtive handshakes during the “greet your neighbor” portions of Sunday services. I had signed up for three solid days of sleepaway Christian fellowship in the Texas Hill Country, responding to a series of church advertisements hawking an “Encounter Weekend” whose program was described with an ominous vagueness. The church Web site indicated that those who went away on the Encounters would learn the “joy” of “knowing the truth” and “being set free.”