Wayne Moses Burke

Wow! Talk about exciting. I attended a full meeting of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs yesterday morning and got a good taste for how Congress runs. While there was plenty on the agenda for the meeting, it really all came down to discussion of saving the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Well, this was quite a thing, so it seems. You see the original plan was enacted in 2003 to provide $15 billion over five years to a select group of countries.

The difficulty with this plan is that it is focused on abstinence and faith-based solutions. Now I understand that there are those (including Congressman Rohrabacher (R-CA)) who believe that HIV and AIDS are caused by lifestyle choices and that if those damn heathens would just shape up and follow the morality set forth by any particular group that holds the moral authority to preach to others, everything would be fine. As you may be able to tell, that’s not me — peoplez out there gotz different idears and wayz o’ livin’! You go country to country and culture changes - expectations change - what is acceptable changes, and unless you live there or are native in a substantive way, you can’t go making demands about how things are going to be. Well, not if you want to be helpful at least.

But I digress - the point is that there is a debate about the legitimacy of certain aspects of PEPFAR. I’m sure there are tons of good discussions all over the internet dealing with it if you’re interested.

So it’s up for renewal, and even though there are contentious elements, it seems generally accepted that we, as a country, need to be doing something, and that PEPFAR has made a significant difference in the lives of <some large number> of people.

The beginning of the meeting felt a little like some sort of NGO hug-fest, frankly. You know what I mean - the kind where everyone quotes a bunch of numbers out of context about how many people and children are dying and all we have to do is get the whole world committed to solving this problem and it will magically vanish — all love and kindness and good intention without any form of pragmatic understanding underpinning the discussion?

Except that there was $50 billion on the line! And it passed! I’m not withholding for suspense here. It did pass on to the floor (By the way, the $50 billion is spread over five years, and includes money for TB and Malaria and adding more countries, including some in the Caribbean, but not Mexico).

Now the hug-fest comment is slightly unfair. Why? Because there is a lot of data behind this discussion and I’m sure PEPFAR’s doing great things (although I don’t personally know the details). It’s just that the meeting made me wonder about the goal of such a meeting. It was very confusing and I suppose I have much left to learn about Congress, but the final version of the bill was compromised into shape last night, added to the agenda immediately following that, and all but one of the Congresspeople present received the latest markup when they arrived for the meeting. And it’s big! Several of them were a little put off by this.

So the meeting started with this “hug-fest” all about how great bipartisanship is and all the hard work that went into pulling the bill together at the last minute and all that sort of thing - then there was the occasional bitch about how we’re not taking care of Americans — why should we take care of Africans, and then there were several people unhappy about this being sprung on them at the last minute (mostly Republicans, interestingly enough).

Congressman Payne (D-NJ) even used the fact that the White House was involved in the final negotiations to encourage the hold-out Republicans to vote for the bill. Funny, right?

Okay, so that all worked out as I said above — they passed it on to the floor of the House and everyone fully expects that it’ll run right through and President Bush’ll sign it. But here’s one of the most entertaining parts of the event:

I’m standing in the overflow room (because I misjudged the length of time it would take to get through security) watching one of the Congressman (I’m sorry, I forgot to note which one) talk about the joys of having an anti-prostitution clause in the bill, when this guy sitting in front of me a little way on a table, flips off the TV screen! Brilliant, I think! This cat is a little scruffy looking — although clean — in a T-Shirt that he had pasted letters onto, with green jeans, some form of hand-written tattoos on the inside of his left arm (probably done himself, could have been a sentence or a mathematical formula), converse high tops with a white diamond pattern on a black background, an assortment of obscure ear piercings, and get this: green, metallic fingernail polish! A fabulous get-up to be celebrated in its own right, but a strange place to find it, at least in my mind. He certainly felt right at home expressing his opinion (quietly) in the great halls of lawmaking in the most powerful country in the world. That is some of the point of why we’ve all been drawn to hang out in the nation’s capital.

Here are some official links:

• Statement of Acting Chairman Howard L. Berman on the committee markup of the Tom Lantos and Henry J. Hyde United States Global Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria Reauthorization Act (H.R. 5501)
  Verbatim, as delivered
• Committee Approves Landmark Renewal of U.S. Global AIDS Prevention Effort
• United States House of Representatives House Committee on Foreign Affairs