Is it a coincidence that Republicans in the House of Representatives appeared poised to pass their MegaDeath Bill on the very day when the Earth finds itself at its aphelion, farther away from the life-giving warmth of the sun than at any other point during the year? Clearly not.
Occurring every July, the aphelion makes it so yeeting some of the worst and most damaging legislation ever to ooze forth from the back rooms of GOP Capitol offices directly into the fusion-fueled fires at the center of our solar system is harder than on any other day. Will Republicans pass the bill that will yank health insurance and SNAP benefits away from millions, kneecap the renewable energy industry, and facilitate the largest wealth transfer from poor to rich ever seen perhaps at the precise moment — 3:55 PM Eastern Daylight Time — when our fragile Pale Blue Dot is floating about 94.5 million miles from Sol? In order to stave off an immediate solar kamikaze mission in which that bill is sent to a glorious fiery death — almost certainly.
Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries continued trying to stall the passage of the bill that will add trillions to the national debt in service of the destruction of social services and enrichment of the already rich, but perhaps inadvertently did so as the planet on which he stood to speak inched closer and closer to its most remote spot. If he were to speak all the way through that moment, allowing the Earth to start its slow trek back inward, a three-million-mile march culminating in our perihelion in January, it might make the 940-page-bill’s journey toward the sun’s corona where it could be dismantled into its constituent atoms slightly more realistic.
Perhaps Republican leaders are confused, as the stifling heat both at home and abroad may indicate to them — rubes, clearly — that our planet is in fact closer to the sun than ever, rather than drifting toward a lonely spot at the flat end of an ellipse. Perhaps they are careening toward passage of their bill in cult-like celebration of the very concept of hellfire, not understanding that our planet’s tilt on its axis is what gives us the seasons rather than the millions of miles between aphelion and perihelion. If so, perhaps they would prefer to migrate their legislative victory to another planet, perhaps a cold and lifeless one square in the sights of our home’s most dead-eyed ghouls, where they could enjoy the 26-million-mile orbital eccentricity and the 31-percent variation in sunlight it provides. From there, if they timed it just right, it would be even harder for any dissenting voices to take 1000 pages of wanton destruction and hurl into the roiling center of our life-giving star. An idea to consider.
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