INTRODUCTION
Are you on the toilet?
Sorry, I don’t mean to be crude. You see, my publisher tells me this is a “gift title,” that is, a book that will be given to news junkies as birthday presents, left under Christmas trees for poli-sci majors, and purchased on a whim for especially disgruntled NPR listeners. That got me thinking: What kind of book do people typically gift?
1. Cookbooks
2. David McCullough books
3. Coffee-table books
4. Books you read on the toilet
You’re not going to find any stir-fry tips in here. I’m not a nationally beloved chronicler of the Founding Fathers and this isn’t a glossy compendium of Man Ray photographs. So it’s a bathroom book, which mean you’re more than likely to be, er …
… well I’m just glad you’re here! My humble offering may live in a little wicker basket beside your toilet, sandwiched between a decade-old Elle and a jaundiced, water-warped collection of crossword puzzles, but I’m OK with that.1
You might well be wondering: Why is this guy rambling about the toilet? Isn’t this a book about politics? Where are the juicy tidbits about interns and tales of wanton corruption and malfeasance? And what is an omnibus bill? Three things:
1. Be patient, that’ll come later.
2. “Juicy tidbits.” Heh.
3. Hear me out.
As far as associations go, you could do worse than politics and excrement. Given the political arena’s near perpetual state of dysfunction, linking feces and government just feels right, y’know? Like, on a visceral level. I’m not saying the next time you mention politics while playing Taboo or Catch Phrase a friend will exuberantly blurt out, “fecal matter!,” but considering human waste is regularly used as an adjective to describe our leaders, and since we’re on the topic already, let’s run with it. Also, a lot of very respectable and important people I interviewed for this book suggested I do an entry on the best places in Washington to use the bathroom. I didn’t, but it came up a lot.
A lot.
We don’t think of politicians on the toilet, do we?2 Then again, we don’t usually think of anyone on the toilet. But as with Santa Claus, Oprah, and your mother, we ascribe a kind of Barbie and Ken quality to our legislators. You may be surprised to learn that legislators are actual human beings. Very flawed human beings, sure, but human beings nonetheless.
We do ourselves a disservice when we dehumanize Washington and reduce its processes and people to a few superficial talking points. Checks and balances, lobbyists, pork barrel spending, the electoral college, filibusters, Dick Cheney’s bimonthly virgin sacrifice upon a marble altar in the Heritage Foundation’s basement to placate the icy god of darkness and ward off the eternal sleep of death for another moonturn, yadda yadda yadda. The more entrenched this view becomes, the less able we are to grasp the complexities of the situation and perhaps even start to do something about it. Yes, there is corruption and yes there are systemic issues that can probably be fixed if we removed our heads from our asses—they’ll come up often enough in this book.
If there’s one thing to keep in mind as you read The Beltway Bible, it’s this: the problems affecting our government are more complicated, more muddled, more difficult to pinpoint, more … human than your civics textbook or favorite cable news show might make them out to be. Understanding cases of unapologetic wrongdoing and learning the basic systems of government are the easy parts. If Washington’s only problems were a surplus of Jack Abramoffs or our ignorance about quorum calls, our problems would be much more readily identifiable and fixable. Not only is the government infinitely complex, but so, too, are the people in and around it, and when you combine the complexity and vagaries of human nature with the complexity and vagaries of a government overseeing 300-plus million people, things don’t always go as planned.
Washington isn’t a nest of vipers. Really. It’s a city of mostly well-intentioned people who, like the rest of us, sometimes cut corners out of expedience, self-interest, or, quite possibly, the greater good. It’s a city defined not by its cardinal sins, but by its venal ones. For every bug-eyed backbencher who insists Mexican immigrants are all al-Qaeda sleeper agents, or every slick lobbyist clamoring to sign an energy company that drenched half of Puget Sound in unrefined crude, there are thousands of far more relatable individuals committing much less conspicuous, and more ethically muddled, offenses: the congressman who votes for a discriminatory bill that won’t go anywhere to earn political capital so he or she can defeat their challenger who would bring a much more harmful agenda to Washington; the reporter who holds off on a story about a senator’s special interest fundraiser to stay in the lawmaker’s good graces for a larger piece about malfeasance among congressional leadership; the political staffer who holds their tongue when a colleague cashes out at a lobbying firm because they, too, might one day want to stop working eighty hours a week while making $45,000 a year.
All these people, I might add, use toilets.
It’s the ubiquity of these minor-to-moderate transgressions that both perpetuates some of our government’s deeper problems but also, in an odd way, keeps Washington from becoming a den of unbridled corruption—Babylon with flag pins, if you will. On the one hand, such behavior generates a feedback loop, making it more and more normal as the years roll by. On the other hand, the latticework formed by these networks of noble-minded but ethically imperfect politicos creates a kind of moral safety net, allowing some of the ethical give that most of us accord ourselves, but serving to keep people from plunging themselves into the proverbial muck and mud of the Washington swamp.
Of course, there are countless people who crash through that net. You’ve likely read a lot about them: amoral members of Congress, lawbreaking lobbyists, and so forth. This isn’t to excuse them, and this book is by no means an establishmentarian treatise. Yet there’s a yawning gap between what constitutes the status quo and what constitutes human behavior. Understanding how our very human government officials and advocates navigate our institutions and the rules governing them is the first step toward fixing the status quo. Anyone who insists that throwing the bums out will solve all our problems is doing themselves and you a great disservice.
This mentality is illustrated, literally and figuratively, by two incredibly heinous paintings by the artist Andy Thomas, Callin’ the Blue and Callin’ the Red.3
They’re great: both paintings depict groups of presidents, living and dead, playing pool. In one, a smiling Barack Obama prepares to sink a ball into the side pocket as former Democratic presidents including Andrew Jackson, JFK, and Bill Clinton look on, sporting shit-eating grins and sipping bourbon.4 A similar scene is represented in the Republican painting, with Abraham Lincoln slyly grinning beside Teddy Roosevelt while Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, both Bushes, and Gerald Ford share laughs.
Both paintings make Dogs Playing Poker look as abstract as a Miró canvas, and if it weren’t for an absence of happy little trees, you’d think the things were dreamed up by Bob Ross. Also, not for nothing, it’s remarkable that Andrew Jackson walked into his presidential bro hang, saw a black guy, and didn’t immediately drop dead again.
Also, who invited Gerald Ford?
Aesthetic judgments aside, the paintings’ awfulness really derives from what they represent: a two-dimensional understanding of Washington, not only of our leaders, but how they deal (or should deal) with one another. Depending on whom you ask, Washington is either too chummy, or not chummy enough. Whatever the case, and the truth is a little of both, the two sentiments are ably represented, albeit in comic exaggeration. It speaks to the images that flicker into our minds when we hear phrases like “Beltway insiders” and “the political class,” or when we read that all of Washington is abuzz over something, or consider the city’s entrenched clubbiness that obscure House candidates vow to single-handedly dislodge. Somewhere, the thinking goes, the entire political class—those Beltway insiders, those people “familiar with the situation”—are all crammed into a pool room somewhere, guffawing, slapping backs, and plotting to line their pockets and destroy your life.
Of course, few people actually believe that a freshman congressman will change Washington, and most of us have a sense that Washington’s power base is too diffused to fit into a single wood-paneled lounge. However, there’s a small part of us that nevertheless buys into the idea that Washington’s ills and the people who perpetrate them are two-dimensional, easily identifiable, and eminently fixable. If only. Mario Cuomo famously said that we campaign in poetry and govern in prose. We also critique the government in poetry—angsty, adolescent poetry, but poetry nonetheless.
The hundreds of thousands of people who scurry about our federal offices are flesh-and-blood humans with mortgages, families, nagging blood pressure problems, hidden caches of porn, and the countless other challenges and personal blemishes that characterize modern white-collar life. These are overstressed boomers trying to balance the rigors of work, life, and family; heartbroken twentysomethings rebounding from breakups by numbing their brain with booze and their thumbs with Tinder; untold numbers of people counting down the hours until they can get home and watch television in their underpants; aging office workers who long ago stopped removing their security badge from their neck for the train home.
There are moments of acute unreality, to be sure—a senator striding across Constitution Avenue while wolfing down a Starbucks breakfast sandwich; the Lincoln Memorial coming into view as you whiz down Rock Creek Parkway; the mind-boggling poverty that exists in Washington mere blocks from the National Mall and the imposing Beaux Arts federal offices that encircle it. And, in a certain way, that’s what this book is. Not just an overview of how the government works and classifications of the people tethered to it, but how those people and those institutions metabolize the amazing realities and unrealities of power. While I hope The Beltway Bible provides you with information that may have been omitted from CNN, I also hope much of it is recognizable. There isn’t much distinguishing the kabuki theater of political spin from the kabuki theater of your company’s community service day, when your boss and the head of HR pretend your employer’s mission statement, “Growing Opportunity, Growing Communities,” is anything other than PR-derived bunk.
Political books tend to be divided into two camps. On one side, you have your serious books: the policy proposals, the probing biographies of lawmakers, the deeply researched histories of legislative battles. These are the books that earn people endowed chairs at prestigious universities and appearances on the PBS NewsHour, that allow Times reporters to go on book leave, and that solemnly collect dust on bookshelves in austerely furnished and rarely used living rooms. On the other side, you have your juicier books: the tell-alls, the gossipy campaign ticktocks, the D.C. social diaries, the autobiographies from iconic movers and shakers with titles like A Good Run: My Life At the Center of It All. These are the books that titillate political observers, that prompt endless speculation, and that undoubtedly have the best book parties.
Practitioners of both genres turn up their noses at each other. The serious author scoffs at the philistine fluff peddled by their counterparts; and, from the cramped confines of their think-tank office or newsroom cubicle, comforts himself with the fact that he is truly doing God’s work. Across town in his Georgetown rowhouse den, the mover and shaker grins, reclines in his Eames chair, and sips his bourbon.5
However, like most anything else in life, politics is a mixture of the high and low, the academic and the unquantifiable reality of life on the ground. This book won’t cover every last thing about Washington—a person could spend their entire life trying to chronicle and alphabetize every Senate rule or campaign trail fixture and still not get past “John Roberts’s Coffee Breath.” It will, though, contain introductions to most of the basic stuff: how bills are passed, how the White House and federal agencies are structured, how the Supreme Court works, yadda yadda yadda. Mixed into that will be entries on the people who pull the levers and twist the gears, and (hopefully) vivid and humanizing accounts of the people who try to influence them.
I didn’t follow a formula in choosing what to include, or how many column inches to dedicate to each issue. Are super PACs as significant as Jumbo Slice, the drunk food political staffers wolf down in the wee small hours? Of course not. But since warts-and-all depictions of Washington’s denizens so rarely accompany descriptions of governmental mechanics, I felt compelled to give extra attention to some seemingly frivolous things in the hopes of creating a more resonant account. Also, I had a lot of fun with the Jumbo Slice entry. My account might sometimes be overly raw, a little messy, and perhaps a little mean, but so, too, is Washington.
So to those of you on the toilet, I hope this book makes your future digestive endeavors more enjoyable and informative.
Copyright © 2016 by Eliot Nelson
