“There’s no harm in testing it, is there?” Huke asked.
“Well, it might be hard to persuade people who are sick with Capellaviridae that the cure involves letting them get bit by the same dust mite that gave them the virus in the first place.”
Huke laughed. “Do you think it was easy persuading people that injecting them with a weakened polio virus would protect them from polio?”
66.
THE PRESIDENT WAS OPENLY AND SHOCKINGLY DISMISSIVE OF many members of Congress. Part of that stemmed from his animus toward the Speaker, which had only deepened since the beginning of the Outbreak. “You don’t have to be a genius to win an election,” the President told me once after I had expressed amazement when a congresswoman from Arizona declared that it was still an “open question” as to whether germs cause disease. “That’s not the craziest thing I’ve heard,” he said, turning to the Chief of Staff. “What’s the name of that guy from Tennessee who kept introducing bills to ban witchcraft in schools?”
“I don’t remember his name, but he served eight or ten terms,” the Chief of Staff said.
“Then he got arrested for sexual assault.”
“No,” the Chief of Staff corrected him. “That was the guy from Kentucky.”
“With the wooden leg.”
“I don’t think it was wooden, but yes, he had a prosthetic leg.”
The President turned to me and explained, “He ran a campaign saying he’d lost his leg to an IED in Afghanistan. Turns out he was never in the Army. He lost his leg in a drunk-driving accident on a motorcycle.”
“He still got elected,” the Chief of Staff added.
“He served a bunch of terms. Didn’t he get reelected after he was arrested?”
“I think so,” the Chief of Staff said. “He had to give up the seat when he was sentenced. There was a special election.”
“That’s right,” the President said.
“How does someone get elected with a fake war record and then reelected after being arrested for sexual assault?” I asked.
The President waved his hand dismissively, suggesting my question was as naïve as I felt it to be. “He blamed the press. Said it was fake news. All the usual crap.” Then he turned more serious. “People aren’t paying attention. That’s really it. Americans are busy driving their kids to soccer practice and designing iPhone apps and bashing government—until something like this happens, then everyone wants to know who’s going to fix the mess. Is there an iPhone app for this?” He picked the Chief of Staff’s phone up off the table in front of us. “Which button do I push to get more Dormigen? Is there an app to fix the Middle East? How about getting Newark schoolkids to read at grade level? Has Silicon Valley figured that one out yet?” An uncomfortable silence settled over the room. Then the President said, “They elected him again, didn’t they?”
“Who?” the Chief of Staff asked.
“The guy with the prosthetic leg who got arrested for sexual assault.”
“Yes, I think so. He ran when he got out of prison.”
The President threw up his arms, as if to say, “See!” And then after a moment, more seriously: “You can’t systematically ignore governance and then expect it to work well.”
I remember passing the Chief of Staff in the corridor hours later. She pulled me aside and said, “He’s tired.” I knew immediately what she was referring to.
“That doesn’t make him wrong,” I replied.
“No.”
Congress had certainly not distinguished itself in the hours since the Outbreak had become public. There had been a flurry of legislation introduced to nail the barn door shut: a bill to ban the outsourcing of Dormigen production; a bill declaring access to Dormigen “a basic American right”; a bill formally censuring Centera; and many others that had no chance of passing and would not have helped the situation even if they had. Then there was the bill demanding an investigation into Israeli involvement in the Dormigen shortage (introduced by the avowedly anti-Semitic “white Christian caucus”). This was the “teakettle” activity that the Senate Majority Leader had predicted at the beginning of the crisis—legislators presenting the illusion of action for constituents who did not know, or did not care, that introducing a bill is different than passing a law.
The President was not, however, dismissive of Congress the institution. He had a group of legislators whom he and the Chief of Staff referred to as “the adults.” Every once in a while, he would turn to her and say, “Let’s run it by the adults.” As best as I could infer, this was a group of ten or twelve senators and thirty or forty House members whom the President respected a great deal. The group, which studiously avoided publicity, had coalesced near the end of the Trump presidency when a handful of serious legislators across parties began to believe that American governance had become dangerously unhinged. Some of the more impressive legislators in each chamber—former governors and Rhodes Scholars and CEOs and even a Ph.D.—began meeting informally after yet one more threatened government shutdown. There was no formal membership, just a series of relationships among serious people who sought to transcend the rancor and futility that had engulfed Washington. There was no ideological litmus test; the group included several committed progressives and one hard-core libertarian. What the participants had in common was a genuine commitment to civility and an aspiration to govern. In that spirit, they called themselves the “Conventioneers,” after the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, the group of Americans who came to Philadelphia in 1787 representing an array of regions, interests, and ideologies and, over the course of a long, hot, arduous summer, managed to compromise their way to one of the greatest political documents ever written. No one ever told me why the President called them the “adults” rather than the “Conventioneers.” I do know that the Congressman from Kentucky with the prosthetic leg was not one of them.
The “adults” were not powerful enough to pass legislation by themselves. Too much of what had to be done in Washington involved medicine the country was not prepared to take. They could, however, derail the very worst ideas. They could also generate momentum for an idea whose time had come. The press and the nation’s opinion leaders respected their collective wisdom. Most of the members were sought-after guests on news programs, not because they yearned for the spotlight (many were openly disdainful of it) but because media outlets were keen to have guests who could offer a modicum of depth. (Ironically, the legislators most eager to get on such programs were typically the least-favored guests.) The Conventioneers were not miracle workers; they had to win elections like everyone else. Then again, so did the delegates to the Constitutional Convention. The President’s informal liaison with the “adults” in the Senate was the Majority Leader, who had earned that position because of his decades-long reputation as a legislative workhorse. In the House, the President typically called Gail Steans, a particle physicist who had run for her first term in Congress when she was well into her fifties.
The President reached out to the adults before his formal briefing to Congress, both to ensure their support and to get feedback on his proposed remarks. He contacted Representative Steans first. She was a feisty woman, short and wiry, with a husky voice, who seemed perpetually annoyed that human beings did not act as predictably as other elements in the universe. She had been elected as a Democrat but left the party and became independent when the Speaker started trying to tell her what to do. (After the President was elected as an independent, it gave cover to a small but influential group of legislators to ditch their party affiliations. Three senators and eleven representatives had also been elected as independents.) The scuttlebutt in the capital was that Representative Steans did not “play nice” with her Washington colleagues. That was misleading, as she was a delightful and courteous person who happened to have zero patience for political nonsense. “I’m too old for that crap,” she would often remark. In fact, she was well liked by her fellow Conventioneers, who often looked to her for guidance on scientific matters.