Congress Just Demonstrated Peak Functionality
By: Phoenix Congress
Tags: Congress, American Union, Politics

Photo by Caleb Fisher on Unsplash

Five thousand, five hundred and ninety-three.

That’s how many pages are in the legislative package passed by Congress this week. The House approved it just hours after its members received copies of the legislative package, a $2.3 trillion monstrosity that was created by combining various bits of legislation and delivered to the House and Senate for an up or down vote. The Senate followed suit a few hours later.

With more than $740 billion for “defense spending,” it includes the largest military budget in human history. The remainder was a combination of domestic spending and a coronavirus relief package, which included $600 stimulus checks for most Americans, along with a slew of unrelated provisions.

It would be easy to write a lengthy article about the abuse of process, bemoan the billions for Space Force, or rant about the irrelevance of the Horseracing Safety and Integrity Act and the study of the 1908 Springfield, IL race riot. Red flags should be raised about new felonies for streaming video illegally, legislation which never had a public hearing. But it doesn’t matter. All of it, all 5,593 pages, is now headed to the president’s desk.

This is how Congress actually works.

Don’t let anyone tell you Congress can’t pass legislation whenever it wants to.

We can pretend that Congress is a deliberative body, one which gives a fair hearing to every legislative proposal, where legitimate concerns will be addressed and amendments given fair consideration. But it rarely works that way. Instead, Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi have ability to sidestep everything Schoolhouse Rock taught us about how a bill becomes a law.

The first step to changing the system is to acknowledge it as it is, not as we wish it would be. By giving us a peek behind the curtain this week, Congressional leaders have revealed that they have the power to force an up-or-down vote on any legislative package that they want. Let that sink in.

The legislative branch might like to pretend that it has tied itself in knots, but it’s really just posturing. It’s a manufactured crisis designed to stimulate outrage and spur political donations.

Congress has the ability to act whenever they want, but they choose not to.

The unemployment benefits that expired in July? Congress chose not to act, and nearly 8 million people have fallen into poverty as a result.

Congress is Constitutionally obligated to pass a budget, yet they chose not to act by the start of the fiscal year in October. Instead, a series of temporary extensions were passed to delay a government shutdown, with the last expiration looming right behind the votes for the omnibus bill.

2020 has been a tough year for America and the world, exacerbating many existing problems, including those driven by what Martin Luther King Jr. identified as the triple evils of poverty, racism, and militarism.

Every night, more than 12 million children go to sleep in poverty.

Every morning, more than two million Americans wake up behind bars.

All day long, the sun shines down on our hundreds of foreign military bases.

These are the policy decisions that Congress has made; if not directly, indirectly, by refusing to challenge the status quo. We can do better.

As we’ve written previously, the Phoenix Congress model for fixing America’s political structure involves a parallel track for the introduction of legislation. Our crowdsourced legislative package has been available to the public for months, with hard copies mailed to Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi and a demand that they put it to a straight up-or-down vote. After this week, there can be no pretense that they don’t have that ability.

We address 2020’s problems — and MLK’s triple evils — by ending poverty with universal basic income, ending mass incarceration with police and prison reforms, and ending the endless wars and closing some of our foreign military bases. This legislative package is a blueprint for a better America, and it’s only 159 pages long. [PDF]

Congress has the Constitutional authority to follow whatever rules a majority agrees to, and the ability to put 5,593 page legislative packages on the president’s desk. But their ultimate authority rests with We the People, and when enough Americans are willing to put people and policy over partisan politics, a better political system — a better America — can rise like a phoenix.