Whatever Happened to the Lab Leak Theory?

Shapers of public opinion and media news editors are at a loss, but Congress isn’t taking any chances.

Photo by Parastoo Maleki on Unsplash.

House of Representative Amendments titled, “Amendments to the labor, health and human services, education, and related agencies appropriations bill FY2023,” don’t normally get much attention in the news cycle.

Such documents are usually filled with bland legal language and near-incomprehensible bureaucratic jargon like, “On page 117, line 9, insert ‘IN GENERAL. — ’ after ‘(a)’,” and, “On page 43, in the paragraph beginning with, ‘Alcee L. Hastings’, in the last sentence, strike the word ‘tobacco’”.

Amendments, even short ones, are often very long. They frequently cover a wide range of issues, with scores of corrections, revisions and inclusions. House Appropriations Committee amendments make for interesting reading- for people who consider C-SPAN interesting.

Still, in the many committees of the House of Representatives is where the magic of democracy happens, or where the sausage gets made, depending on your perspective.

In important committees like Appropriations, the whys and wherefores and what ifs are abandoned eventually, if temporarily, for the more practical and workaday question: “How?”

From the will of the people to the law of the land, someone needs to get things moving from point A to point B. Our duly elected representatives have been democratically selected to serve as these generals.

Good generals talk tactics; great generals talk strategy: Winning generals talk logistics.

They don’t always agree, to say the least, which is why the slow-motion magic of our democratic process sometimes looks like a hot sausage-making mess. Though elected officials in Congress and in the Senate may debate bitterly, even viciously, compromise only grudgingly, and claw tenaciously for ever inch, a bipartisan group has always managed- somehow- to keep the U.S. chugging along.

All the well-meaning will of the people aside, the intentions of the framers of the Constitution are meaningless if the people elected to run the government can’t competently spend the tax largesse of one of the wealthiest countries in the world without driving the nation into penury…