Tastes Like Chicken

There should be no omnibus spending bills, except for one that consists entirely of “The U.S. government shall buy an omnibus to drive members of Congress from the Capitol to their residences,” and nothing else.

Well, you say, it should specify the cost of the omnibus. Okay. And it should provide for a driver. Okay. And it should insist that the driver’s hiring be done in accordance with EEOC rules. Okay. Well, as long as we’re adding things, there should be a provision to establish an omnibus-driving school in every state.

NO.

Look, you’re not going to get this passed unless there’s something for everyone.

But it’s for them! It’s literally a bill that pays for a bus that takes them home! There’s already something for everyone!

As long as we’re talking about transportation: Stories about the Gibraltar-sized wobbling mass of fat called the infrastructure bill often say something is “buried” in its depths. As in: “Buried in the bill is a $426,032 grant to the University of Idaho to study the racist history of the potato.” But it’s not buried, any more than a plot point is buried halfway through a novel.

You don’t need a backhoe to exhume details like this: The bill sets up a committee to explore the idea of a mileage tax. You can only hope there’s someone on the committee who states the obvious.

“I suppose it’ll be necessary, since the shift to electrics means less gas-tax revenue. But at least we’ll compensate by sunsetting the gas tax and have a transition period where internal-combustion-powered cars are exempt from the new levy.”

Silent faces all around the table, and then the speaker bursts out laughing. “Man, I had you going! Okay, what do we call it? How about the ‘Freedom to Drive Act’? They’ll technically still have that; we’ll just know everywhere they go. Also, we should partner with one of those CSI shows and have them find the hideout of some white supremacists by accessing the mileage-tax data, get the people behind the idea.”

According to another provision, your car will also presume you are drunk, since the bill wants an alcohol-detection system that won’t let the engine start if you’ve been overserved. If this had been around last year, with everyone constantly dousing themselves in alcohol-based sanitizer, no one would have gotten out of the garage. I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t let you do that.

“Open the pod-bay door, you stupid car, I’m not drunk, I’m just exceptionally sterile.”

What does this have to do with infrastructure? The question would baffle some of our brightest. Why, cars drive on roads, and roads are infrastructure, so — is this a trick question?

No, it’s not. You know what else passes on roads? Chickens, I am informed by a venerable joke, cross roads. So the infrastructure bill, using the same logic that gives the CDC the power to set rents, could contain a passage that regulates coop dimensions for the poultry industry and no one would know about it until eggs cost $4.46 apiece.

Consider California, which passed laws on the minimum size of pigpens. Since producers in other states cannot comply at the moment, this forces consumers to use only Golden State oinkers, and since there aren’t enough to meet demand, the price rises so high that you can actually say “when pigs fly” and be referring to your breakfast bacon. If the infrastructure bill contained a plank that required all chickens to have bigger cages, and it made prices rise, most consumers would just blame the grocery store, or producers. Vox would explain why insects were a superior alternative. Ten years later, everyone’s eating Buffalo Cricket Wings or Bug-fil-A, remembering the good old days when the phrase “tastes like chicken” didn’t produce a blank stare.

If you point out that the chicken plank doesn’t belong in a bill about bridges and roads, you don’t care about animal welfare. If you object to government-mandated monitoring devices that tell the state precisely how much you drove, then you don’t care about funding roads. If you object to the presumption made by a booze detector, and worry about malfunctions, then you don’t care about drunk driving.

To rope another hot issue into the mess: If you care about the constitutionality of the CDC’s eviction moratorium, you don’t care about people being kicked into the fog of COVID that grips the street like a scene from a Jack the Ripper movie. If you do care about the legality of the federal government setting local election standards, you don’t care about democracy.

I’m sorry, our democracy. It’s always our democracy, unless the election results went the wrong way.

The other day President Biden issued an executive order that set a new goal: Fifty percent of the nation’s autos sold in nine years will be zero-emission. This does not include the emissions and pollution generated by battery manufacture or coal-powered energy production; it just means that the stuff that comes out of the tailpipe will be as pure as a toot from Gabriel’s horn. You know some people are unhappy that it’s just a goal, not a law.

Uh — the great and powerful leader directing factory production is a little like, well, the f-word, no? How can you call conservatives fascists when they’d let anyone drive whatever they wished, free from government dictates? It reminds you of Henry Ford’s old line about consumer preferences: They can get any color they like, as long as it’s black. The new school: You can get any color you like, as long as it’s green.