The Re-Supply Campaign
It’s Saturday morning on the outskirts of Small Town, USA. There’s a frenzy of activity in the kitchen as emptied cereal bowls and spoons stack in the sink, and a brimming trash bag is replaced with a new one. For the third time, a multi-page checklist is meticulously scrutinized by the “Domestic Engineer” like the instruction manual of the backyard “jungle gym/adventure center.” Fido is feasting on a full bowl of kibble, and he’ll take his time because he recognizes this pattern of activity; he knows he’s about to have four uninterrupted hours to binge-watch the black-and-white episodes of Lassie. (Technically, they’re all black-and-white to him.)
The infant in the portable car seat is sucking down much-anticipated nourishment, dimples accentuated with each suckle, and a slow drip of formula leaking from the bottom lip to the chin to the onesie, as predictable as a tax increase, only considerably less waste. Mom barks out last-minute commands accompanied by a NASA launch-like countdown. She locates the wad of keys that is the size of a small ballroom chandelier, causing strangers to assume she’s a community college janitor. They control door locks, shed locks, PO Box locks, and a small fleet of vehicles, including their behemoth Suburban, roughly the size of the local bottling plant, only thirstier.
The middle child, the daughter, is still in her pajamas. Mom has instructed her to get dressed in the clothes laid out on her bed, and has watched her head upstairs no fewer than three times on that mission, only to be distracted by her pet turtle. The adolescent son is scurrying about, looking in every nook and cranny for the AirPods that he swears were on the kitchen counter last night. Mom bravely investigates the baby’s diaper with a single finger, checking its condition, and giving it a quick sniff for confirmation.
But they’re out of time. Mom ritualistically shouts, “We’re leaving!” knowing that she’s probably bluffing and hoping that no one picks up on it. She tucks her lists, her keys, her protein shake-filled Yeti tumbler, and a couple of extra diapers—for good measure—into the jumbo diaper bag, and throws it over her left shoulder. She lugs the car seat, suckling baby in tow, and heads to the SUV.
A noticeably frustrated teenager follows, now on a mission of his own to vent his frustration on the world, imagining the dead-cellular-zone journey to town with only a Mom-controlled radio to drown out an inevitable Baby Shark anthology.
“Where’s your sister?” Mom asks, dismayed that he has abandoned his routine duty of bringing his younger sibling and buckling her in.
“She’s coming,” he says, more hopeful than informed.
“For the love of…” Mom replies, self-censoring to prevent an arms race escalation before they’ve made it to the main road. She pops open her door and starts to get out just as the still-pajama-clad daughter is dragging along at a snail’s pace.
“Hurry up, baby!” Mom bursts, as she meets her more than halfway, picks her up, and decides that PJs will have to do. At least she has her SpongeBob slippers on.
With everyone strapped in and the radio programming cued, the troupe heads to the “big box” store about 30 miles away—the oasis of supplies for a family who’s chosen to eschew the hustle and bustle of city life. This bi-weekly journey is less a shopping trip and more a pack mule resupply operation, and running out of milk, diapers, and dog food is not an option. The entire exercise feels like a dress rehearsal for an Elon expedition to Mars, albeit one with a markedly more flexible dress code.
The Compromise Tug-of-War
Upon arrival, Mom and the kids climb out of the SUV, ready to carry out their regular assignments. The teenager secures two shopping carts from the nearby stall, test-drives each, and eliminates those with wobbly wheels, bent frames, or anything that might compromise their ability to carry a heavy payload. PJ Girl cooperates with Big Brother to get into the child seat of one of the carts, whose cargo space will be shared with the baby’s command module. This one will be steered by Mom, with the other to be navigated by the son, who’s just found his AirPods in his jeans pocket and determines that a public discussion would serve no useful purpose.
Inside, the team takes a “divide and conquer” approach to this campaign—a battle plan refined over time through trial and error, and repeated contact with the enemy. Mom takes produce; too many judgment calls to leave in the hands of someone who despises vegetables and prefers fruit in the form of a roll-up. Big Brother is dispatched to handle bread and breakfast with specific instructions on unit pricing, sugar content maximums, and expiration date checks. PJ Girl, well… her opinion is solicited when her attention span is exhausted.
Each cart becomes an arena for negotiations. The baby’s formula competes for space with Christmas gifts. Anniversary party decorations fight for a place alongside laundry detergent. Dog food on sale at an incredible price settles the debate over whether to pick up extra bundles of bottled water on this trip or the next.
And so, the Compromise Tug-of-War repeats its familiar pattern, echoing at times long-settled arguments that refuse to subside, and newfound quarrels born out of impulse.
“No, we’re not getting another gaming headset,” or
“Since when did Parmesan chips become your favorite food? After you saw it on TikTok?” or
“We’ll never eat twenty pounds of Beanie-Weenies before they expire,” or
“If you went to bed on time, you wouldn’t need any energy drink capable of jumpstarting a Cadillac.”
Some debates center on budgetary constraints. Some hinge on questionable judgment. A few venture into more serious territory. “No, we’re not buying that video game. You’re not 17+, and you’re certainly not Mature.” And, like clockwork, Mom pulls out the “If you won’t watch it with your grandmother, it’s not going in the cart” veto.
Eventually, the carts contain something that everyone wanted, though many items seem to cater to individual interests. Some of the items are staples and garner all the enthusiasm of paying a car insurance bill. Other items are championed and justified by only one person, while the rest go along with it because “I don’t want to be here all day” routinely pummels logic into submission.
With both carts filled above the rim and boredom overtaking Big Brother, fatigue spreading from the baby to PJ Girl and on to Mom, the team labors to get both freighters to the register. Simultaneously, Mom is doing the math in her head to ensure they haven’t gone over budget, glad she passed on the frozen pizzas. Then she quickly pulls up her banking app and double-checks that there are sufficient funds to cover any bills that might have come through overnight and all the items they’d gathered.
The Package Deal Ultimatum
As the line crawls, Big Brother is offloading his cart first while Mom keeps an eye on their inventory, sipping the protein dregs of her Yeti. As Big Brother’s cart nears empty, Mom begins to systematically place her items on the conveyor belt, taking care that all the essential items didn’t somehow get lost on the way. PJ Girl is starving by now, what with the parade of colorful cereal boxes, string cheese, and tantalizing grapes. About the only thing worrying Mom right now is the fact that the baby has just fallen asleep, which ruins her nap schedule for the day. But that’s an acceptable tradeoff to a crying baby in the checkout line.
About ¾ of the way through, Big Brother stealthily asks the cashier for two cartons of cigarettes. The cashier reaches over her shoulder, obliges, and tosses them onto the conveyor belt, with Big Brother tucking them in behind the four Family Size boxes of Cheerios, fingers crossed. But this isn’t Mom’s first rodeo. She spots the anomalous break in the pattern and snatches them up immediately, her side-eye glare sending a message to the wannabe street tough. “Where’d that come from?”
Just then, the store manager approaches her and says, “I’m sorry, ma’am. Store policy. Once an item reaches the belt, the purchase becomes a package. You buy all of it or none of it. We can’t pull an item out of the bundle.” He points to a small sign in fine print that outlines this store’s policy as the cashier continues scanning items. Mom learns that the policy is unassailable and non-negotiable—the first time all day that compromising had been declared illegal.
Mom is faced with a dilemma. The cigarettes have already been scanned, and only a handful of items remain. The customer behind them is now staging their items behind the dividing stick—one segregator to rule them all. The manager locks Mom into a staring contest with the confidence of a man who’s seen this movie dozens of times.
Should she tell the manager what he can do with his groceries, herd the troupe back to the ironically named Suburban—which mocks their decision to move “way out”—and drive thirty miles home with nothing to show for their outing? The baby is starting to stir, PJ Girl is whining about starving, and Big Brother is studying the showdown for anything he might be able to use to his advantage in the future.
Mom does the math in her head one last time. The cigarettes are, maybe, $20, while the rest of the haul is just under four hundred. She turns to the son who, by now, is pretending to be interested in the latest edition of Woman’s World, and realizes she just doesn’t have the willpower to wage this war.
“Bag it. All of it,” she capitulates, with an obvious resignation.
As Big Brother straps PJ Girl into her car seat, he carefully avoids eye contact with Mom. He knows he’s crossed the line. More importantly, he knows Mom isn’t going to prosecute this in the parking lot. The matter won’t be forgotten, only postponed. And the baby isn’t the only one with a mess to clean up when they get home.
The Capitol Hill Routine
Naturally, no grocery store in America would run things this way. Customers would protest, managers would be fired, and competitors would easily craft commercials that would almost write themselves. However, when the scenario shifts from a checkout lane to Capitol Hill, this same setup is surprisingly seen as entirely fair.
No one left the big box store thinking that Mom had suddenly become an advocate or enabler of youth smoking. Everyone understood the situation: the cigarettes remained because they had been bundled with diapers, formula, groceries, Christmas gifts, and other essentials in the carts. It was a no-win situation—an impossible choice with flawed options—embodying a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” dilemma. But for Congress? That’s just normal protocol.
Washington actually has a name for this sort of thing. It’s called an “omnibus bill”—a Latin term meaning “for all” or “including everything”—and has become the default method in modern Washington. Instead of debating and passing separate appropriations bills through transparent, open processes, a highly polarized Congress now waits until the “eleventh hour” to stuff every national priority, pet project, and contentious policy “rider” into a single, massive bill that is often unread. In such an environment, legislative accountability disappears entirely.
Like a grocery bagger tossing frozen food in with Christmas presents, the omnibus combines unrelated measures into one package. This way, harmful provisions can go unnoticed under the pretense of necessity, while logic is overwhelmed into submission by the looming threat of a government shutdown.
Congress passed the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, which envisioned twelve separate appropriations bills (e.g., Defense, Agriculture, Transportation) moving through Congress in regular order. The Act required lawmakers to vote on these twelve items individually and pass them by a strict deadline. The last time Congress actually met that deadline was in 1996 for Fiscal Year 1997—and even then, they had to cheat the system by bundling several bills together. To find the last time Congress both met the deadline and fulfilled the law’s intent by voting on every single item separately, you have to go all the way back to 1994. Since then, continuing resolutions, omnibus bills, and last-minute funding packages have largely replaced the system the Act was designed to combat.
Whatever the original justification, the system now provides enormous leverage during manufactured deadline crises and makes accountability exceedingly difficult.
At the state level, most governors can cross out a single objectionable provision while approving the rest of the budget. The President cannot. The Supreme Court ruled that such an act violates what’s known as the Presentment Clause of the Constitution. In other words, a President must sign everything or veto everything, which would trigger a government shutdown.
Nowadays, massive bills, often thousands of pages, are presented in the middle of the night and voted on hours later. Lawmakers scrutinize the bill like a teenage boy studies Woman’s World, except they become less enlightened. They literally have little to no idea what they are voting on, which provides perfect cover for special interest groups to slip in pet projects without scrutiny.
We would never tolerate an all-or-nothing grocery store. We’d never accept a manager who insists that cigarettes, diapers, baby formula, Christmas presents, and groceries are inseparable once they hit the conveyor belt. Yet we routinely accept the same logic when it’s applied to trillions of taxpayer dollars. Every time Congress faces a budget showdown, the result is the same.
“Bag it. All of it.”
Perhaps the real mystery isn’t why Congress behaves this way. Perhaps it’s why we’ve grown accustomed to it—and don’t do anything about it.
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This post was previously published on Daniel McAnally’s blog.
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