(Senator Robert Byrd, D-WV, tunes his fiddle. Photo courtesy of Eem in Cambridge, MA).

We have been down the rapids on a variety of issues together over the last fourteen years. We have wandered through history, taken adventures in urban and country living, traveled across oceans and marveled at the diversity of this amazing world.

One of the first Daily Stories was about a trip via government helicopter to visit the Naval Security Group installation at Sugar Grove in the foothills of the West Virginia mountains. I still have the ballcap from the trip, which was part of a fact-finding mission for the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control, Computers and Intelligence. That was a mouthful, even back in the day- “ASD-C3I” was the more convenient means to describe the office, then occupied by The Honorable Art Money.

That was his real name. No kidding.

I was doing some sort of budget stuff at the time and there had been appropriations language inserted into the Senate bill that directed SecDef to go out and see how splendid a place Sugar Grove was. The author of the directive was, of course, Senator Robert Byrd, a colorful rascal who played the Senate like his bluegrass violin.

Nobody in the party wanted to go, much less spend money we had not programmed on things we relly didn’t need. But the law of the land said we had to go and look interested or suffer the wrath of the Legislative Branch. There used to be a saying on the Hill that there were three political parties in town: Republicans, Democrats and Appropriators.

Senator Byrd’s accomplishments for his state were the stuff of legend. He was many things during his more than a half century in the Senate: briefly a Klan member, speechmaker, country fiddle player, lecturer and author. But it is his role as an appropriator that leaves his name emblazoned across West Virginia: on highways, schools, even the world’s largest radio telescope. It is located in the National Radio Quiet Area, another of Senator Byrd’s legacies, turning the lack of development into a plus for his state.

The Quiet Zone was the reason we were visiting. The Senator wanted us to know of all the good things we could fund if we knew what was good for us. Over his career, he steered $3.3 billion dollars worth of earmarks to West Virginia. My little story about it now seems quaint. We don’t even think about it. The President just requested a little more than that for an oversight in not programming for shelter for the hundreds of thousands of “aspiring workers” who are flooding across the southern border.

That is what we are supposed to call them, right? The throng is also described as “children,” which is to say a lot of them are pretty hard-case teenagers who may- or may not- have some skills we emphatically don’t need.

Back in those days, I was all about trying to explain “how things work in Washington,” but I have got past that. After working in this town since the mid-eighties, I thought I had pretty much seen it all. Actually, I had seen exactly nothing.

That is why the stories are getting increasingly hard to write. I mean, the illegal aliens are just today’s thing. The litany is getting so long that I had to diagram them all. I stopped at around thirty things that would have had assorted Federal troops on my front porch had I attempted any of them. Some now have multiple mini-scandals contained inside them, so I had to add sub-bullets to the larger list. Some are just wrong-headed, like militarizing local law enforcement and then handing them the no-knock midnight raids of the War on Drugs. Some are much worse than that.

A lot worse.

The IRS matter may be the one that I find the most troubling, since it is the Federal Agency that can actually ruin your life, garnish your paycheck or commandeer your bank account without recourse. The government that I was part of was composed of people who basically were trying to do the right thing. I do not get that feeling these days.

Even Bobby Byrd played by the rules, arcane though they were. The Senator used to carry a copy of the Constitution around with him to brandish in support of whatever he happened to be doing that day on the Hill. I found him to be an admirable old fossil that connected us to the long and storied history of the Senate he so loved.

Now, I can only surmise that the logical executive branch response to legitimate inquiry from the legislative branch is to promptly destroy evidence of misconduct. That used to be called “obstruction of justice” and it used to be a crime.

Now it appears to be standard operating procedure. It is not just at the IRS- there is a similar case at EPA that is nearly as brazen.

In fact, the culture of corruption is so pervasive, the lawless conduct so bold, that I am not confident we can go back to anything that looks like a functioning government based on law, nor regulation by fiat. How would we even begin? There is way too much toothpaste squeezed out of the tube to hope to cram it back in.

I have absolutely no idea how we get out of this one, and that is why it is increasingly difficult to even confront the myriad of problems in the morning. It is starting to make me feel physically ill. I miss Senator Byrd’s Washington.

I know the old saw about eating the elephant. You just have to make it small pieces, and get started. Problem is, I do not get the sense that anyone is hungry for pachyderm at the moment.

Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303