09-09-09 or Congressional Hearing on H.R. 2227

Nine years of consecutive digits on at least one day of the year. Where did they go?

I graduated three years ago, on 06-06-06 at 6:00 p.m. If you can believe it, these past nine years have been filled with three years of middle school, three years of high school, and now, three years of college. I wonder what the next nine years hold?

… but… before my thoughts get too nebulous and spacey I will get back to business.

Today was exciting.

Fifteen minutes after I got to work, I left the office the walk down the Longworth House office building, down the road by the Capitol. As I walked down the street carrying my laptop, adorned in my suit, and having a “professional, non-silly” expression on my face, I hope that some people thought that I was a serious Washingtonian with serious business. It was fun to pretend that I was.

I walked back a few people with portable sound systems and cardboard signs protesting abortion and something about the military. I didn’t look too closely.

Something interesting about the House building: there are elevators marked “Members only” that only members of Congress (and I assume their staff) can ride in. I’m sure there must be a better reason than just outright superiority, but I certainly felt like I was less of a person because my representatives in Congress didn’t want to ride with the “plebeians” on the elevator.

I got to the hearing half an hour early and there were already ten people in line. I went to the Energy and Mineral Resources subcommittee hearing on H.R. 2227 (The American Conservation and Clean Energy Independence Act). Basically, it is a bill that opens up a lot of now-closed areas for off-shore drilling in order to finance America’s “transition” into clean, renewable energy sources. Decreasing our dependence on oil/gas will be very costly, and we simply don’t have the money right now. One representative called this energy policy “the Apollo of our time.”

The hearing was really interesting. The procedure was very interesting to me. It was very formal and proper (Everyone recognized the chairman for holding the hearing, and “yielding” time to the chairman. The chairman recognized everyone as “the gentleman’s time has expired” or “the gentlewoman’s time has expired.”), but it was very oppositional and antagonistic at times. The Chairman and the Ranking Member (different parties) disagreed in their opening statements, before the hearing had even begun! And I’m surprised the guy from the Sierra Club didn’t run out of the hearing room. He took a beating.

The Ranking Member referred to an article I had just read the day before about the double standard in litigation for windmill and oil/gas companies. (Oil/gas companies have to pay millions because they kill a few hundred birds a year, but each windmill kills approximately one bird a day.) I knew what he was going to say before he said it!

The hearing went for about two hours and eventually declined into a solid thwapping of the Sierra Club. But it was very interesting. I hope I get to go to some more.

Observation about politicians: at least at this level, they are very smart, funny, and charming (most of them). They fight with each other all day everyday, but they’re still friends. I take that back. They don’t fight. They disagree. I think it’s great that our political process is so adversarial. Someone always disagrees and we always get to see the other side of the issue. And wars aren’t started over it. America is one place where you can agree to disagree, and it’s great.

Oh and they’re always promoting their own agenda or their party’s agenda. As you would expect. Half of the time they would “ask a question” when really they just wanted to show that they were right. I expect all of these records are kept and they will always be responsible for what they said, even in committee.

When I got back I had enough work to do to keep my busy for the whole day without getting bored—a first!

I cleaned up my notes from the hearing for my supervisor (she wanted to know about revenue sharing—something that they didn’t really talk about at all). And then worked more on the defense committee appropriations requests for FY10. Today I entered the requests for the Ranking Member, Senator Cochran from MS. I thought Inouye had a lot! Cochran had almost $700 mil and I’m not even done yet! Tomorrow I will match up campaign contributions with earmarked handouts.

I went to dinner group and then seriously debated whether I should go to Institute or watch President Obama’s joint address to Congress. I really had a moral dilemma. I was all set to skip Institute and watch the speech, when social pressure caved in and I decided I should go to Institute. Two hours later (after class and talking with some people about politics), I came back upstairs and I can’t find a video of the speech anywhere! C-span’s website is overloaded and it isn’t loaded on YouTube yet. Curses! I’ll just have to read about it tomorrow….