We’re still assessing the damage from the comet strike on Monday. I don’t know about you, but I think we managed to get through without damage. There were some repairs I needed make, but so far the insurance company isn’t buying the comet strike, and I guess I’ll have to pay for them myself.
If you missed it, the Reverend Harry Walther, who runs a doomsday website filled with four square, ironclad Biblical prophecy and/or sudoku puzzles, was absolutely certain that Utah was going to be smacked by a comet last Monday. It was supposed to hit at daybreak, with enough force to kill 20 million people. For some reason, the mainstream media neglected to warn us of this impending peril. I learned about it because I ski with a member of the clergy, and he receives regular email updates on this sort of thing. They have some kind of service that alerts them so they can get ready. It was probably a breach of protocol to share the alert with me, but I guess there was no harm because I’m certainly not going anywhere in the Rapture.
When the world didn’t end on Monday, the only thing left to do was go skiing, which was quite nice almost spring-like. You can forgive Rev. Harry if he had been just a little bit off in his prophecy. But he didn’t miss it by a couple of hours, or even days. He was just flat out wrong. Accuracy like that may work for weather forecasters, but when it comes to forecasting the end of the world, it’s pretty embarrassing to be standing there the day after, business as usual, trying to explain that a high pressure caused the cataclysm to split and go south.
This isn’t Rev. Harry’s first rodeo, and he had an explanation. His official statement on the comet’s failure to appear is: “It is very possible that NASA used ‘Deep Impact’ to shatter or re-direct this comet threat, and sometime in June or later, NASA will announce that back in March 2010 they ‘shattered a comet in deep space that posed no threat to earth.'” Well, that’s a relief. Never mind.
With the comet threat off the table, we are back to more mundane details of life. In Congress, it becomes more clear every day that a comet strike on the Capitol would be a good thing. The inability to get anything done is just painful. The House is bad enough, but the Senate has to be the most worthless group of people in history. First it was the Republicans filibustering everything. Under ordinary math, 51 out of 100 is a majority. In the Senate, where their internal rules require 60 votes to let something come to a vote (it can pass with fewer, but there is a vote to let it come to a vote first), 41 Republicans are a majority. Of course, it helps that the Democrats are so disorganized that they would have trouble passing legislation if the Republicans all left town for a cruise paid for by the health-insurance lobby. The Democrats couldn’t get out of their own way if they had all 100 seats in the Senate.
But now we have another stupid rule. Any single senator can put a block on a bill. So this week Kentucky Sen. Jim Bunning single-handedly blocked action on a bill to extend unemployment benefits. The bill also included spending on highway projects and was the kind of thing that seemed like a no-brainer when unemployment is high and jobs are scarce. Bunning’s point was that they were spending $10 billion, and he thought they should decide where that was going to come from before spending it. I actually agree with his premise. Finding revenue other than shaking the cup at the Chinese would be a good thing. But a $10 billion unemployment extension seems like a cruel place to draw the line in the sand.
Not even the Republicans, who are generally obstructionist jerks, were with Bunning on this. But the Senate rule allows one member to shut down the other 99 senators indefinitely, and we wouldn’t want to mess around with rules like that.
Congress has just gone Looney Tunes. The Republicans are Yosemite Sam, ranting and raving, guns blazing in all directions, saying NO to everything, never mind who gets hurt in the crossfire. The Democrats are Elmer Fudd, twacking a wabbit with a shotgun loaded for bear but completely incapable of figuring out how to fire it. It would be pretty funny except for the fact that the country is really falling apart, and doing nothing is not likely to solve any of the problems. The solution, of course, is to throw them all out of office at the next election.
But in the meantime, is there any possible reason we are paying members of the Senate to show up for work?
Tom Clyde served as Park City attorney in the 1980s and is the author of “More Dogs on Main Street.” He has been a columnist at The Park Record for more than 20 years.