In his performance at the Human Rights Campaign’s Stand Up For Equality in San Diego last month, D.J. Pierce returned briefly to his Shangela experience to explain to audience members what life was like on RuPaul’s Drag Race. He suggested that Ru might tell two audience coworkers (paraphrase): I’m sorry, my dears, but this week your spread sheets were sub par. You are up for elimination. Prepare to lip sync for your lives.
Such comparisons can be instructive as well as amusing, particularly for occupations that can be hard to understand. Consider Congress and the debt ceiling. They morphed a previously routine vote into a sword of Damocles, and then couldn’t agree on a bargain of revenue increases and spending cuts that would actually help. Instead, they enacted a largely irrelevant amount of spending cuts, tossed the hot potato to a committee and still lost America’s AAA bond rating. Passing the buck in such a manner only seems normal because Congress keeps doing it. Imagine if your physician did the same:
“Maam, as your doctor, I’m sorry to say that you have cancer. In the past, we’ve treated this sort of problem with a combination of radiation and chemotherapy. Right now, however, there are a few oncologists who refuse to work with radiologists, and the others don’t want to upset them. Don’t worry – I plan to convene a super committee of particularly ornery physicians to come up with a plan in five months, by which time things will probably have worsened. In the meantime, the oncologists and I will give you some chemotherapy. It won’t really help, and might make you worse, but at least you’ll feel like we’re doing something.”
Two things become crystal clear: people wouldn’t tolerate a physician who behaved like Congress, and if Congress were in charge of health care, people would get sicker. Oh, wait. Congress is in charge of health care, and people are getting sicker.
When confronted with such clear negligence at the federal level, defenders of government often look more locally for evidence of efficacy. Unfortunately, the Congressional habit of kicking the can down the road seems laudable compared to the San Diego City Council’s habit of throwing up their hands at the first sign of adversity:
“Sir, I know I just started that antibiotic yesterday, but some other patients called and said it might not work. It would be really expensive to argue with them, and I don’t have time to come up with something else right now, so we’re just going to have to stop everything and see what happens.”
I refer, of course, to San Diego’s prescription for regulating medical marijuana dispensaries, which was torn up after activists gathered enough signatures to put a repeal on the ballot. Rather than altering their legislation or allowing all voters to weigh in on election day, the City Council decided to repeal their own plan, leaving the voluminous work of the Medical Marijuana Task Force sitting next to us, unused, back at square one.
Particularly sad is that what started as an example of best practices, at the levels of direct and representative democracy, ended for the worst reason. Real democracy, it turns out, is too expensive. Our elected officials will stand behind legislation so long as no one has enough money – I mean signatures – to challenge them. At least in the case of medical marijuana, it was arguably concerned citizens who opposed the legislation. I’d hate to see what will happen when a big corporation with deep pockets finds out how easy it is to get the City Council to back down. Oh, wait. Wal-Mart already did, and may be on its way to Southeast San Diego.
Unfortunately, we can’t fire ineffective legislative bodies like bad physicians. We can only choose our own representatives, and 50 percent of voters approve of their congressmembers, despite a 13 percent job approval for Congress as a whole. That doesn’t leave any easy answers. The closest thing Congress has to a licensing board is an ethics committee, and they can’t keep tax evaders and solicitors of prostitutes from being re-elected. While the trial would be great TV, citizens probably don’t have standing to sue for legislative malpractice.
Maybe we should put forth a referendum to make legislators lip sync for their lives. Absurd, to be sure, but if we get enough signatures, it might be enacted. At least until a supercommittee raises taxes enough to fund a full vote.
