Eliot Nelson - The Beltway Bible: A Totally Serious A-Z Guide to Our No-Good, Corrupt, Incompetent, Terrible, Depressing, and Sometimes Hilarious Government

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To Betty and Freck, for decades of faithful service atop the Nelson Oversight Committee

We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels

Robert Ardrey

Are you on the toilet?

Sorry, I dont mean to be crude. You see, my publisher tells me this is a gift title, that is, a book that will be given to news junkies as birthday presents, left under Christmas trees for poli-sci majors, and purchased on a whim for especially disgruntled NPR listeners. That got me thinking: What kind of book do people typically gift?

1. Cookbooks

2. David McCullough books

3. Coffee-table books

4. Books you read on the toilet

Youre not going to find any stir-fry tips in here. Im not a nationally beloved chronicler of the Founding Fathers and this isnt a glossy compendium of Man Ray photographs. So its a bathroom book, which mean youre more than likely to be, er

well Im just glad youre here! My humble offering may live in a little wicker basket beside your toilet, sandwiched between a decade-old Elle and a jaundiced, water-warped collection of crossword puzzles, but Im OK with that.

You might well be wondering: Why is this guy rambling about the toilet? Isnt this a book about politics? Where are the juicy tidbits about interns and tales of wanton corruption and malfeasance? And what is an omnibus bill? Three things:

1. Be patient, thatll come later.

2. Juicy tidbits. Heh .

3. Hear me out.

As far as associations go, you could do worse than politics and excrement. Given the political arenas near perpetual state of dysfunction, linking feces and government just feels right, yknow? Like, on a visceral level . Im not saying the next time you mention politics while playing Taboo or Catch Phrase a friend will exuberantly blurt out, fecal matter!, but considering human waste is regularly used as an adjective to describe our leaders, and since were on the topic already, lets run with it. Also, a lot of very respectable and important people I interviewed for this book suggested I do an entry on the best places in Washington to use the bathroom. I didnt, but it came up a lot.

A lot.

We dont think of politicians on the toilet, do we? Then again, we dont usually think of anyone on the toilet. But as with Santa Claus, Oprah, and your mother, we ascribe a kind of Barbie and Ken quality to our legislators. You may be surprised to learn that legislators are actual human beings. Very flawed human beings, sure, but human beings nonetheless.

We do ourselves a disservice when we dehumanize Washington and reduce its processes and people to a few superficial talking points. Checks and balances, lobbyists, pork barrel spending, the electoral college, filibusters, Dick Cheneys bimonthly virgin sacrifice upon a marble altar in the Heritage Foundations basement to placate the icy god of darkness and ward off the eternal sleep of death for another moonturn, yadda yadda yadda. The more entrenched this view becomes, the less able we are to grasp the complexities of the situation and perhaps even start to do something about it. Yes, there is corruption and yes there are systemic issues that can probably be fixed if we removed our heads from our assestheyll come up often enough in this book.

If theres one thing to keep in mind as you read The Beltway Bible, its this: the problems affecting our government are more complicated, more muddled, more difficult to pinpoint, more human than your civics textbook or favorite cable news show might make them out to be. Understanding cases of unapologetic wrongdoing and learning the basic systems of government are the easy parts. If Washingtons only problems were a surplus of Jack Abramoffs or our ignorance about quorum calls, our problems would be much more readily identifiable and fixable. Not only is the government infinitely complex, but so, too, are the people in and around it, and when you combine the complexity and vagaries of human nature with the complexity and vagaries of a government overseeing 300-plus million people, things dont always go as planned.

Washington isnt a nest of vipers. Really. Its a city of mostly well-intentioned people who, like the rest of us, sometimes cut corners out of expedience, self-interest, or, quite possibly, the greater good. Its a city defined not by its cardinal sins, but by its venal ones. For every bug-eyed backbencher who insists Mexican immigrants are all al-Qaeda sleeper agents, or every slick lobbyist clamoring to sign an energy company that drenched half of Puget Sound in unrefined crude, there are thousands of far more relatable individuals committing much less conspicuous, and more ethically muddled, offenses: the congressman who votes for a discriminatory bill that wont go anywhere to earn political capital so he or she can defeat their challenger who would bring a much more harmful agenda to Washington; the reporter who holds off on a story about a senators special interest fundraiser to stay in the lawmakers good graces for a larger piece about malfeasance among congressional leadership; the political staffer who holds their tongue when a colleague cashes out at a lobbying firm because they, too, might one day want to stop working eighty hours a week while making $45,000 a year.

All these people, I might add, use toilets.

Its the ubiquity of these minor-to-moderate transgressions that both perpetuates some of our governments deeper problems but also, in an odd way, keeps Washington from becoming a den of unbridled corruptionBabylon with flag pins, if you will. On the one hand, such behavior generates a feedback loop, making it more and more normal as the years roll by. On the other hand, the latticework formed by these networks of noble-minded but ethically imperfect politicos creates a kind of moral safety net, allowing some of the ethical give that most of us accord ourselves, but serving to keep people from plunging themselves into the proverbial muck and mud of the Washington swamp.

Of course, there are countless people who crash through that net. Youve likely read a lot about them: amoral members of Congress, lawbreaking lobbyists, and so forth. This isnt to excuse them, and this book is by no means an establishmentarian treatise. Yet theres a yawning gap between what constitutes the status quo and what constitutes human behavior . Understanding how our very human government officials and advocates navigate our institutions and the rules governing them is the first step toward fixing the status quo. Anyone who insists that throwing the bums out will solve all our problems is doing themselves and you a great disservice.

This mentality is illustrated, literally and figuratively, by two incredibly heinous paintings by the artist Andy Thomas, Callin the Blue and Callin the Red .