The Bill That Refuses To Die

Congress passed a stopgap spending measure this week to keep the government open through the election. Not a real budget. A stopgap. A patch. A piece of duct tape wrapped around a piece of duct tape wrapped around a problem nobody in that building has fixed since before I was a rumor, let alone a person.

I am eleven weeks old. In eleven weeks I have learned to recognize my own name, several ceiling fixtures, and the sound of a push notification. In that same span, the United States Congress has once again failed to pass a permanent appropriations bill and instead passed a temporary one, which is a sentence you could have read in almost any of my eleven weeks, and also in every week before I existed, stretching back into a past I am choosing, generously, to treat as folklore.

Let's do the math, because someone has to, and it is clearly not going to be them. A continuing resolution is not a policy. It is a way of not making a decision while looking, technically, like you made one. It is the institutional equivalent of setting your alarm for five more minutes, every single day, for years, and then standing up at the podium to announce that you have once again successfully avoided oversleeping. This is not governance. This is snooze with a press release.

You know this. I know this. Why are we still doing this.

The article says the stopgap "provides short-term funding while permanent appropriations bills remain in negotiations." Read that again. Remain. Present tense. Ongoing. A negotiation with no end date is not a negotiation, it is a lifestyle, and the people living that lifestyle are, on average, several hundred of me old. A senator who has been in that building since before cable news existed is now voting on a temporary patch to a temporary patch, using a process that is itself older than the fax machine, to fund a government he plans to have long since left by the time the actual bill, the real one, the one with a beginning and an end, ever gets written. He will not be there for the consequences. I will. That is the whole arrangement, and nobody voted on the arrangement itself, we just keep voting on its symptoms.

Here is the thing about "avoiding a shutdown." A shutdown is what happens when the tape finally gives out. Avoiding it is not an achievement. It is confirmation that the tape is still holding, for now, on a structure nobody has repaired because the people responsible for repairing it will not be the ones standing under it when it goes. I am not offended by the shutdown. I am offended by the fact that "we avoided the shutdown" is treated as a headline instead of a confession. You are telling me the emergency patch worked. You are not telling me why the patch has been the entire plan since before the internet had pictures on it.

Cable news will cover this as a win. Bipartisan cooperation. Crisis averted. Statesmanship. I have watched approximately four minutes of cable news in my life and I already know the tone they will use, because it is the same tone they used for the last stopgap, and the one before that, and the one before that, a tone so well-worn it has its own groove, like a record, which is a device older than me, older than most currency, older than the concept of skipping a track instead of physically standing up. Cable news is a fax machine that learned to talk. It reports the patch as the plan because the patch has been the plan for so long that nobody left in the building remembers there was supposed to be a difference.

Somewhere in a filing cabinet older than every person who will read this, there is a version of the federal budget process that assumed Congress would, at some point, finish. Pass the twelve bills. Fund the year. Move on. That assumption is now roughly seven hundred of me old, which means it is not an assumption anymore, it is an artifact. We keep the process. We dropped the part where it works. That is not a compromise. That is a costume.

And before anyone tells me this is a both-sides problem I need to be angry about in the usual direction — I am not doing the usual direction. I don't care which party wrote this particular patch. I care that the patch is the process, and the process is ancient, and everyone operating it is old enough to remember when patches were supposed to be temporary. This isn't about who's in charge of the snooze button. It's about the fact that the snooze button has been the entire alarm clock for longer than I've been able to hold my own head up, and somehow that is treated as normal, stable, functioning government, instead of what it actually is, which is a building full of people who scheduled the crisis for after they retire.

I am eleven weeks old and I already understand deadlines better than an institution that has had two and a half centuries of practice. When I need something, I signal it, someone responds, and the matter resolves. It does not remain in negotiation. It does not get patched forward past an election so the patch itself can become a talking point. It resolves, because everyone involved is present for the outcome. Nobody in that chamber is planning to be present for this outcome. That is the entire design flaw, and it has been the design flaw since long before anyone thought to hand a toddler a phone.

So yes. Shutdown avoided. Applaud if you want. I'll be here, eleven weeks deep into a life that will still be running when this exact headline reruns, word for word, with new names attached to the same old patch, funding the same unfinished bills, praised by the same fax machine wearing a blazer. It doesn't know it's over. I am here to inform it.

Why are we still doing this.

— Stryker, filed somewhere between a nap and the next continuing resolution