Maybe Congress doesn't feel the heat

It's not just climate change. As Congress begins a summer recess, it's not meeting much of its agenda.

On the hottest day in recorded history, did Congress even break a sweat? (Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash)

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Those of us who live in the Great Northeast may get a little cocky this time of the year, as one crystal-clear day after another gives way to nights perfect for falling asleep to the steady hum of katydids. We don’t intend to be haughty about our comfort, you know, especially considering those folks around the country who are suffering through heat waves and drought, or tornadoes and flooding. Mind you, we’ve had three heat waves of our own this summer — that is, when the daily high got over 90 degrees for three straight days — and we complained to each other mightily. But contrast that with north Texas, for example, where the entire summer of 2023 met that definition of a heat wave, and the temperature on 26 days reached over 105 degrees. I recall talking with a pal in Dallas on one of those days, and he told me, “You know, there’s a big difference between 100 degrees and 108.” Kind of like the difference between a Mitt Romney and a Ted Cruz, I’d say: One makes you uncomfortable; the other is intolerable.

The other day it was hotter than usual hereabouts, and it turned out to be the hottest day ever recorded on earth: July 22, 2024.¹ It’s likely to be a short-lived record, though, because human-caused climate change is now inexorable. Climate change deniers — people who go along with Donald Trump’s assertion that it’s all a “hoax” and that one of these days the earth will “start getting cooler” on its own — will tell you that climate varies all the time, and it always has, and that government is being alarmist in acting to slow warming. They’re right in but one sense: It probably was hotter once. But that was about 120,000 years ago, researchers say, and last year was the hottest year since then. This year is on target to be hotter than that.²

All of which is to say that we are living in the midst of the kind of climate disaster that scientists have been predicting for years, and which thoughtful public officials have been fighting to turn around for almost as long, with virtually no support from the people who say they want to Make America Great Again. Research by the Center for American Progress reveals that there are 123 climate deniers in Congress — almost one-fourth of the members of the House and Senate. Maybe they’re genuinely convinced that they know better than the scientists, or maybe their view has been influenced by the $52 million that CAP calculates they have received in campaign donations from the fossil fuel industry. So you choose: Are they arrogant fools, or crass opportunists?³

On average, the U.S. now experiences a billion-dollar extreme weather event every three weeks. But climate-fueled extreme weather affects even those of us whose homes are mostly bypassed by natural disasters. It is draining federal disaster aid resources and pushing up the cost of goods and services that everybody needs, from groceries to building supplies to insurance premiums. And what’s ahead is worse, as coastal areas are ever more likely to be pounded by rising seas and more intense storms, as water becomes more scarce and crops fail, and as infrastructure fails and needs rebuilding, from roads to power lines to shoreline barriers.

Yet as urgent as the climate crisis is, it’s just one of the priorities that didn’t get the attention it deserved before members of the House left Washington at week’s end for their annual congressional summer recess. Senators will head out in just a few more days. Beyond climate change, there’s more on the ignored agenda: border security and immigration, Medicare and Social Security (both are on course to being unable to pay benefits due to when people now in their late 50s retire) and most of the appropriations bills that must be passed to fund the government for the fiscal year that begins in just over two months.

That is, official negligence about the climate crisis is just one mark of incapacity that is gripping Capitol Hill. Last year just 27 bills were passed into law — a record low. Near the end of the year, Rep. Chip Roy, a Texas Republican, practically begged colleagues, “Give me one thing I can campaign on and say we did.” You’d feel almost sympathetic if you didn’t have a pretty strong feeling that Roy is part of the problem — that is, one of the extremists who has helped to shape the sad reality that the U.S. Congress is failing.⁴

Part of what has made Congress inept is the hyper-partisanship that is gripping the nation. It’s hard to get representatives and senators to step across party lines when there’s more reward for standing pat. Performances of ideological fidelity draw more favorable media attention and more support from primary voters and party insiders. Accomplishments of bipartisan substance, which are rare, draw suspicion and accusations of political disloyalty.

There’s no more telling example of that than the death this spring of the bipartisan border package that had emerged from months of good-faith Senate negotiation. Then came Donald Trump’s warning that the legislation could take steam away from one of his most potent campaign arguments. So one Republican after another, turning aside provisions in the bill that they had long demanded, announced that they could no longer support it, and the bill died on the Senate floor. “It turns out border security is not a risk to our national security. It’s just a talking point for the election,” complained Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, an independent from Arizona.⁵

And so goes the legislative process these days. The Republican-led House couldn’t pass appropriations bills in recent weeks because of opposition from far-right members. But before leaving town this week, the House did pass a border-related resolution sponsored by Rep. Elise Stefanik, the opportunistic hard-right Republican from Upstate New York. The resolution condemns Vice President Kamala Harris for not stopping the flow of migrants into the U.S., declaring — in language clearly more befitting a political party’s press release than an action of Congress — “President Biden’s and Border Czar Harris’s far left Democrat open border policies are to blame for this historic crisis.” Unsurprisingly, the resolution, which has no force of law, drew a lot of coverage on Fox News.⁶

Indeed, that underscores the role of the media ecosystem in the emergence of Congress as more of a performative stage than a working institution. Until Fox News was created in 1996, major media outlets with a national reach followed the accepted journalistic standard of truth-telling: that is, they tried to give their broad audiences a true sense of what they might need to know that they couldn’t see for themselves. Fox reneged on that promise by deciding to present news with an intentional bias that would please conservative viewers. It has been remarkably successful as a business and impactful on society. Without the incessant distortions of Fox News over two decades before he descended the Trump Tower escalator, it’s hard to imagine that Donald Trump could have become president in 2016.

That contorted storytelling, incidentally, remains key to the business model of Fox and News Corp. This week The New York Times reported that 93-year-old Rupert Murdoch is quietly trying to get a court to change the supposedly irrevocable trust he set up in 2000 with the intention of turning over his media empire equally to his four oldest children. Now Murdoch wants to abandon the trust, claiming that his business’s profits hinge on the conservative bias that only his son Lachlan among the four can be trusted to maintain. Truth and profit rarely coexist comfortably.⁷

It's not that Fox is the only disreputable media organization encouraging showboating by lawmakers, but it is the most powerful, and it was the first to seize the opportunity of niche marketing the news. But it didn’t happen haphazardly. Fox emerged in a political environment that had over the several previous years become more brutally partisan, in no small part because of the leadership of Newt Gingrich, the Georgia Republican who became House speaker in 1995. In Burning Down the House, published in 2020, Princeton University political historian Julian Zelizer argued that Gingrich and his followers created the vicious partisanship that is the reality of today’s Congress. Fox and its friends just gave oxygen to the incendiary attack on democratic norms launched by Gingrich and his backers. We’re still shuffling through the ashes of the destruction.

Perhaps the reality of frustration and failure is what is prompting so many retirements that will follow this Congress: 45 members of the House and eight senators currently serving aren’t seeking re-election. For people who genuinely hope to make a difference for America — for independent spirits or patriotic workers unwilling to embrace the rigid demands for partisan alignment — what goes on in Congress these days must be disheartening. No wonder they’re leaving town this week.

Or maybe it’s just the weather. Through June this year, the average monthly temperature in Washington was 4.1 degrees above normal — it would have been higher except for some oddly cool days in May — and the capital is now in the grips of the steamy season that saps the strength and spirit of even the most patriotically-inspired public servants. “No good legislation ever comes out of Washington after June,” Vice President John Nance Garner declared in the 1930s.⁸

So maybe the legislative branch should just give it up for a while, and give a break to the cynical performers and the serious public servants alike. Let the climate deniers welcome their oil and coal lobbyists to some summer fundraisers, and let the legislators who take the job of representing our best interests more seriously get some rest with their families. In 1959, Margaret Chase Smith, a conscientious Republican senator from Maine, urged her colleagues to take an annual break from August to October. She noted that the heavy workload was then causing “confused thinking, harmful emotions, destructive tempers, unsound and unwise legislation, and ill health.”

That sounds like an apt description of Congress nowadays — though it’s clearly not the lawmaking that is causing one branch of our federal government to so obviously shirk its duties. And it’s not the weather, of course. The causes are deeper than that, and the consequences are intolerable. Maybe Congress needs to feel more heat.

1. https://www.accuweather.com/en/climate/truly-uncharted-territory-monday-was-the-hottest-day-recorded-on-earth/1671687

2. https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/national-international/monday-is-the-hottest-day-recorded-on-earth-beating-sundays-record-european-climate-agency-says/3601594/#:~:text=Many%20scientists%2C%20taking%20those%20into,2024%20have%20broken%20even%20those.

3. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/climate-deniers-of-the-118th-congress/

4. https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-CONGRESS/PRODUCTIVITY/egpbabmkwvq/

5. https://apnews.com/article/congress-ukraine-aid-border-security-386dcc54b29a5491f8bd87b727a284f8

6. https://www.foxnews.com/us/kamala-harris-house-condemnation-border-failure-long-overdue-absolutely-warranted-brandon-judd

7. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/24/business/media/rupert-murdoch-succession-fox.html

8. https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/Give_Us_a_Summer_Break.htm

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THANK YOU for reading The Upstate American, and for joining us in the conversation about *our common ground, this great country. I hope you’ll join us again next week — or send a message with ideas you’d like to see us address.

THE UPSTATE AMERICAN will not publish next week. We’re taking a few days off to enjoy the Great Northeast. See you in two weeks.

-REX SMITH