So, in theory, we’re down to our last pope. True, the Malachy list seems to be a 16th-century forgery, whose remarkable spot-on accuracy comes to a screeching halt in 1590.
It behooves us to keep talking about the papal election for as long as possible. Once it’s over, we’re back to the federal budget deliberations, and I prefer a story in which nothing gets sequestered but the cardinals.
Or, ideally, we could go for a merger:
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WASHINGTON — White smoke poured from the Capitol today and crowds of onlookers broke into shouts of jubilation, crying: “We have a budget!”
Inside, where the nation’s legislators had been walled off in seclusion, the newly chosen tax-and-spending plan was garbed in the traditional brass staples for its first public appearance. Insiders said it planned to take the name of Budget for Fiscal Year 2014.
Some of the faithful feared this day would never come, citing the ancient prediction of The Last Budget. Legend has it that during his pneumonia-racked, monthlong presidency, William Henry Harrison fell into a trance and produced a list of 61 speakers of the House from the founding of the republic until the collapse of the Constitution, describing each with a characteristic word or phrase. The slot for Speaker Nancy Pelosi was listed, inexplicably, as “repair the microwave.”
The list predicts that after Pelosi comes a final speaker (“weepy kumquat”) who presides over an era in which Congress loses all remaining capacity to direct the nation’s economic affairs beyond sporadically agreeing, via text, to have the nation’s bureaucracy just keep doing whatever it was doing before.
Fearing the worst, a band of public-spirited citizens disguised as a touring scout troop stormed the Capitol, locked in the members of the House and Senate, and cut off their connections to the outside world. Deprived of their ability to Twitter, the lawmakers quickly came to an agreement.
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OK, this tactic would probably not produce the most progressive document in the history of the world.
How would you get the locked-in legislators to find a path to agreement? First, Paul Ryan would have to announce that somebody misplaced the real Republican budget proposal and that the thing he introduced last week was an old copy of his vice presidential campaign platform that he grabbed hold of on the way out the door.
Then President Barack Obama would promise all the Democratic senators who are up for re-election that he would go to their states and tell their voters that everything unpopular in the agreement was his fault.
Then everybody would work out a reasonable compromise that includes new revenues. Then Rand Paul would ascend into heaven via the Capitol dome. All of this has been predicted by a little-known saint in the 19th century. I have a copy.
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