Blue Nettles

The Emperor Conrad: and his knighthood he
Did gird on me;
in such a good part he took
My valiant service. After him I went

To testify against that evil law,
Whose people, by the
Shepherd’s fault, possess
Your right usurp’d. There I by that foul crew
Was disentangled from the treacherous world
Whose base affection many a spirit soils;
And from the martyrdom came to this peace.”
- Dante, Pardiso; Canto XV

You haven't heard from me in awhile and I thought I'd let you know what my last month has been filled with. The Department got its new Secretary and his first big task - other than finding where the bathroom and the cafeteria are - was to testify to Congress on our FY 2006 budget.

My office leads this exersize of preparing him for two, 2-4 hour sessions of being grilled by members of Congress. I believe this is a unique exersize of DC's. It reaches its highest, or most extreme form in the candidate preparations for presidential debates.

This is all part of the dance between our different branches of government. Unlike Britian's Parliament, where the Prime Minister is obligated to hold regular "Question" sessions where members can hammer him with barbed questions, the President cannot be required to answer to Congress and the Constitution only requires that he "from time to time give the Congress information on the State of the Union" which by custom has become annual. Cabinet Secretaries are a different story, like other citizens they can be compelled to present themselves to Congress, but can refuse to tell Congress stuff on the basis of "Executive Privledge" and seperation of powers.

In this case the Secretary needs to go to Congress to ask for money, so he will be as accomidating as possible. Members of Congress love these sessions since they have the Adminstration's senior people in their weakest position. The Congressmen use these opportunities to ask about just about everything but the budget request. And the most important thing to remember is the three reasons why Congress holds hearings:

1. To get on TV
2. To get on TV
3. To get on TV

So to prepare the Secretary we put together twenty, 4 inch thick, binders of: the oral statement, the written statement for the record, bios of all the members of the subcommittees, spreadsheets of data, and most importantly, possible questions and answers (Q&As). These Q&As are provided by our consistuent bureaus, a diverse bunch to begin with, and culled and edited by my office and the legislative affairs office.

Beginning two weeks ago, we started holding meetings with senior people from the bureaus with the Secretary, where he could read the Q&As and question the bureau people and try to get comfortable with the answers. Those meetings took about 10 hours over two weeks. Yesterday we did a "murder board" where we then got him used to articulating all the stuff we were cramming him with by asking the questions in the manner of Congressmen, such as "Why are the Chinese stealin' all of America's jobs? What are you doin' about it?" [in a West Virginia accent] kind of question.

So this afternoon we go up and he gets to be in the hot seat and earn his dental plan and his big fancy office. I'm only going since he likes visuals so we created some economic charts and I have to haul them up and set up the easel to hold them. That is - I am the roadie.

So that is what I've been doing for the last month and I didn't mention the adventures with learning to create table of contents in Word or arguing about the trade deficit with economists.

The wounded men’s fellows, seeing them so evil dight, from afar off began to
rain stones on Don Quixote, who did defend himself the best he might with his
target, and durst not depart from the cistern, lest he should seem to abandon
his arms. -- Don Quixote; Part I, Chapt. III