“You don’t stick your neck out, you don’t have your own opinions-you’re a vessel for ‘My boss thinks this, my boss wants that.’ ” This assumes a top-down, institutionalist theory of change: you’ll get more done by toiling invisibly within the system than by going rogue.Ĭongress has operated this way for decades. “The whole deal with being a staffer, generally, is you’re not supposed to exist,” he said. Levin, twenty-six, is curly-haired and lanky he wore a dark button-down shirt patterned with white flowers and a pin advertising the Congressional Workers Union, which he and other staffers had organized, and which had just publicly launched.
Another word for running out free#
(A few lobbyists and other visitors, waiting to be let inside, clustered near the door, seemingly drawn to the stray wisps of air-conditioning.) He is one of several Democratic staffers who spend their free time organizing their progressive colleagues, through both formal channels (the Congressional Progressive Staff Association, the Climate Left Organizing Coalition) and less formal ones (happy hours, group chats). Last Thursday, Levin escorted me through a side entrance of the Cannon House Office Building, a cell phone pressed between his shoulder and his ear. If that doesn’t sum up the situation, I don’t know what does.”
“Congress leaves town for August because it’s impossible to stand outside for five minutes in D.C.
“We’re almost out of time to pass climate legislation before the midterms because Congress goes on recess for all of August,” Saul Levin, a congressional aide, said the other day. These are not regular people-they are, disproportionately, senior citizens and millionaires, with means of keeping cool that are not available to everyone-but they, too, live under the weighted blanket. This powerful minority includes the President of the United States and all five hundred and thirty-five voting members of Congress. The truly tragic irony is that there are a few thousand people on Earth (fossil-fuel profiteers, government officials, and some who fit both descriptions) who could decide, right now, to start abating the emergency, if only they wanted to. It’s common to refer to this as a collective-action problem, or a global tragedy, as if all the death and suffering were somehow preordained. This is a fact-an ongoing slow-motion emergency-that has already upended the lives of millions of people and could soon injure or displace hundreds of millions more, most of whom are powerless to do much about it. But record-breaking heat, as we know, is the new normal, not just in D.C. This year’s was especially brutal-a thick weighted blanket of mugginess, the kind that makes you want to duck into the nearest Au Bon Pain and spend several hours carefully selecting a beverage. If the mere mention of Capitol Hill doesn’t already fill you with a queasy combination of torpor and despair, then you really must visit during a late-July heat wave.
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