Many citizens are puzzled by the current behavior of the U.S. Senate. Engaging in a 30-hour debate in order to discourage senators from filibustering sounds suspiciously like pouring drinks at an A.A. meeting in hopes that they’ll get sick of the stuff. There will be suffering, no doubt, but there is no real hope of a cure by these means. It simply doesn’t make sense. The only conclusion for a rational observer is that the senators are up to something.
Researchers from the High Energy Rhetoric Laboratory at Glob Labs have been carefully monitoring the planning and execution of this debate, and they feel that their preliminary findings are too important to delay publication. Simply put, the Senate leadership appears to be engaged in a controlled test of high-flux debate in the hopes of experimentally establishing the interchangability of time, energy, and political matters. The Senate chamber is the reaction vessel, and the senators themselves are both the experimenters and the subjects of the experiment.
Quantum social dynamics predicts that heavy, massive political bodies may be rendered unstable under highly charged and pressurized conditions. In the presence of a polarized political field, these bodies are easily excited via absorption of information with a contrary spin state. Typically, the excited political body then emits information of the opposite spin in a speech, returning to his or her normal energy level.
In the current experiment, the Senate leadership have engineered a lengthy and constrained period of debate in which access to the floor will be tightly controlled. By forbidding at-will floor access to excited Senators, these actors will be unable to emit speeches in a timely fashion, all the while continuing to absorb highly energetic bogons and pontificons from the current speaker. By carefully focusing the debate to maximize contrary spin, the Senate leadership obviously intends to excite at least one senator into a critical state, resulting in an explosive conversion of some portion of that senator’s gravitas into negative energy. That depleted senator would then decay harmlessly for the remainder of his or her term into a completely burnt-out actor, politically inert.
Given the slim margin currently held by the majority party in the Senate, this experiment appears to be part of a dangerous game. If the leadership can explode one or more of the opposition, then they will be able to pursue their agenda without let or hindrance until the next elections. However, there is always the danger that senators from the presiding party may also succumb to critical excitement, which could fatally weaken the majority. There is also the possibility of a chain reaction that would convert the collective grey matter of the Senate into waste heat via a self-sustaining, indefinite debate.
Glob Labs is confident that the public is not in immediate danger as a result of this experiment. The experimental vessel is well-contained, so there is no risk of direct exposure to the polarizing pontificon flux within the Senate itself. However, viewing the progress of the debate through media channels may entail exposure to secondary radiation, so the public should exercise caution. Readers of The Glob who fear that they have been exposed to political fallout from this debate are urged to see a licensed physician, especially if suffering from nausea, vomiting, light-headedness, or a desire to address the nation.