Afghanistan is falling to the Afghans, or some Afghans, this morning. The images of hundreds of young people squashed against US Air Force transport aircraft trying to board surpass the old standard established on the Embassy roof in Saigon. This is a new graphic summation of bad decisions. It includes reports of stowaways on the external surfaces of the big jets falling to their deaths.
A lot of the Vet community is anxious about it all, having lived parts of this in their own lives. There is a propensity for the Writers Section at Socotra House to occasionally get ahead of their skis. Loma and Rocket live that way as a continuation of the things they used to get paid for. Demille provides a welcome voice of stability, and is not afraid to shut things down until he is confident the reactor is working properly, though of course there are no reactors currently at the farm. That we are aware of, anyway.
Splash has not been seen since all potentially controversial materials and bi-lines were lost in the tragic canoe incident in deep water near the confluence of Meadowbrook and Summerduck Runs. We like the water boundaries to the lower pastures and do periodically hear things happening in the deeper glen by the bridge, which is also closer to Belmont Farms Distillery. So hope for Splash is not lost.
In fact, hope has not suffered much even in this latest national emergency, whichever one it is. As you have seen, some are alarmed, more than hopeless. “Alarms” used to go off for all of us. They normally meant a quick turn-to, a scope for cause of sounding, action to remedy the problem and then back in the rack. That is not the case in the current situation, and there are several discrete hours before going horizontal is an acceptable option. I got tagged with the outline for what is coming at us. I have always had a fascination for shiny objects, and wandered into the maelstrom of what is coming beyond the collapse of a client state, and what it might mean here next.
Some of the Writers Section are still considering the beckoning aura of the beach, though the uncertainty of new restrictions on movement by the Government has placed a certain reticence on travel, even if it is within State lines. Still, Labor Day has a certain beguiling attraction as a signpost to the changing season. I had started an analysis of what was happening with the budget, which contains all the money it is possible to imagine. And as Demille pointed out, that is only restricted by limited imaginations battered by abuse.
I put aside the memory of President Jerry Ford appearing in Congress to ask for more troops and air strikes to fend off the North Vietnamese Army. I remembered a moment twenty years later standing at that part of the fence where the tanks had come through, the former Embassy now occupied by a fossil fuel ministry. I had my phone in calculator mode and was trying to add stuff up. The Senate passed a thing they called “The Blueprint” of the budget on a straight party line vote. Then they left town as quickly as possible. There was no evidence of anyone making a last moment appeal to save anything. The President is said to be “working closely” with his national security team, and Press Secretary Psaki is on a long planned vacation.
Looking at it, I don’t blame them. Between a lost war and an impending financial crisis, ee had been expecting a thing called a mini-omnibus, which is an odd term for about half the regular Federal budget, but it was expected to have a lot of the Regular order stuff in it- you know, Defense still had a lot of opportunities in it even if it looked pretty flat over the FYDP. The intern glared at me and said I either had to start footnoting or saying awkward things like “Future Years Defense Program.”
“I find that awkward and it detracts from how people actually speak.”
“Since you don’t seem to be speaking English anyway, why bother?” she said firmly.
We could have gone on, but I pulled a folded sheet of paper out of the top pocket of my bush vest. I unfolded it with proper deliberation and slid it across the conference table. “The important stuff is in bold face,” I said with drama, and some of the crowd glanced at the highlighted text:
16 August. Kabul Falls.
23 August. House returns.
06 September. Labor Day.
13 September. Senate returns.
15 September: Budget proposals due to House and Senate Finance Committees.
(not statutory, in Senate Blueprint)
30 September: Midnight, end of FY-21
“I won’t bore you with the details, since that would involve trying to understand how the Senate Blueprint is going to be handled by the House, and what deals will be cut on several Trillion dollars. We can talk about major initiatives as we work through the dates. There are a couple Senators who voted to pass and forward the Blueprint to the House, but don’t support it. You would think the things in the various parts of the bills would be worth talking about, considering the amount of money, but there are other factors to consider.”
Loma groaned and Rocket looked out the window. Demille just shrugged and asked for the action points.
I tried it again. “Calendar-wise, we now have Afghanistan in the rear-view mirror. The Hill is on Summer Break, and the Hill is a wasteland at the moment. Speaker Pelosi has directed the House to come back on Monday, the 23rd, which runs immediately into other commitments for Labor Day on the 6th of September. They have not been completely on vacation. COVID rules have permitted some proxy voting, but they will be hit with looking at the Senate budget Blueprint and the Debt Ceiling first.”
Demille shrugged. “That is the key. The Government needs to raise the debt ceiling or things will shut down. The new debt required to fund what is in the Blueprint will probably require another at least three Trillion in debt.”
“No pain in that immediately, but there be a fight and the usual deficits in the annual budgets.”
“Yeah. The House will have two full weeks in their offices to work on the details before the Labor Day shut down. The Senate says both chambers are supposed to submit their inputs to the two Finance Committees by the fifteenth, and the debt ceiling has to be resolved before the Reconciliation process can really start printing the proposed budget for final approval.”
“Theoretically they have already got to what they need for a CR” I started off, but the Intern glared at me. “Continuing Resolution. But that was what the Blueprint was supposed to be about, so there are issues there.”
Rocket stopped looking out the window and swung back. “I enjoyed flying jets, not sitting down to cost out how much it cost to build them. Is there anything in this mess that has an actual date by which something has to get done?”
Demille tried to bring down the level of emotion building at the table. “Only one, and that is the end of the year at midnight on September 30th. But of course, they have changed that before, so it is hard to say when the circus really runs out of steam. But some people we owe money to will start getting anxious pretty quick.”
“When are we going to talk about what all this is supposed to pay for?”
I left the paper on the table and buttoned the pocket on my vest. “It doesn’t appear anyone is going to talk about much actually in the budget, or lost wars . My guess is that some of it will just be passed without much comment, some of it will fail, and no one who is supposed to start executing it will know what is funded until they get to their offices on Friday morning, October first.”
“Could be fun. Can we still plan a visit to the Distillery for Halloween?”
There was general agreement for unanimous consent on that one, and a hasty motion to adjourn that even the Intern understood. But she stood her ground. “What am I supposed to tell the staff about changing the clocks?”
“You might remind them to Fall Back. There is a fair amount of that going around this week.”
Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
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