Cancerous Politics
Plus: Taking gerontocracy to new heights, a real life Arc Reactor, Happy Festivus, and more...
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.
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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.
An airing of grievances: Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) released his annual Festivus report on wasteful government spending this morning. A few highlights:
- The Department of the Interior spent $12 million on a pickleball complex in Las Vegas.
- The Department of Health and Human Services spent $419,470 to determine if lonely rats want to use cocaine more than happy rats. (And why wouldn't they?)
- The Department of State spent more than $4.8 million on Ukraine-based social media influencers.
- The U.S. Treasury gave a $700 million pandemic-era loan to a trucking company that took the money and then declared bankruptcy. Taxpayers could end up on the hook for all of it.
Scenes from Virginia: The world's first commercial fusion power plant, which could generate enough electricity to light 150,000 homes, will be built outside Richmond, Virginia, and could be operational during the 2030s. Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), the Massachusetts-based company behind the project, said in a press release that it is currently developing a demonstration fusion power generator and hopes to have positive results by 2026 or shortly after.
A working fusion generator would be a massive breakthrough for humanity, explains New Atlas:
Fusion, the process of fusing atomic nuclei to release vast amounts of energy, is the same reaction that powers stars like our Sun. Unlike nuclear fission—which splits atoms and creates dangerous radioactive waste—fusion uses hydrogen isotopes (like tritium and deuterium) and produces helium as a harmless byproduct. It's long been the "holy grail" of clean, unlimited energy and has the potential to revolutionize the global energy landscape.
The nerds in the audience will appreciate that CFS is referring to their Virginia project as the ARC. Officially, that's an acronym for "Affordable, Robust, Compact," but of course, it is also a nod to the compact fusion reactor that Tony Stark builds to power his Iron Man suit. Life imitates science fiction, once again.
QUICK HITS
- Biden commuted the death sentences for 37 inmates who had been convicted of federal crimes (he has no power over state-level convictions, which lead to most executions). Biden's action leaves just three men on the federal government's death row: Tree of Life Synagogue shooter Robert Bowers, Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof, and Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The rest will serve life in prison without parole.
- In a Truth Social post on Saturday, President-elect Donald Trump threatened Panama over what he called "exorbitant prices and rates of passage" charged to use the country's famous canal. Yes, if there's one thing Trump simply cannot abide by, it's a country charging high and arbitrary fees on goods crossing its borders.
- A U.S. Navy jet fighter was shot down over the Red Sea by…the USS Gettysburg. But don't worry: the pilots ejected safely and this won't lead to any reconsideration of America's presence in the region.
- Police in New York arrested a man suspected of killing a woman by lighting her on fire while she slept on a subway car Sunday morning. Despite the obviously heinous crime, keep in mind that New York City is much safer today than it has been in the past 60 years and is far less violent than most other big cities.
- Blocking the sale of U.S. Steel was never about national security. It was just old-fashioned cronyism.
