The Senator Who Almost.

Senator Charles Schumer had developed, over many years, the ability to seem alert while sleeping with his eyes open. He had perfected this talent specifically for committee meetings and any instance of his duty that demanded his physical presence. He could appear to be listening with great attention while actually revisiting a pleasant dream about the New York State Fair pie-eating contest of 1957.

On this particular Tuesday, a Republican senator from somewhere west of reason had been talking for twenty minutes about the need to replace all government functions with a series of opaque pamphlets.

Schumer's mind drifted further.

In his dream, the pie was blueberry.

"Senator Schumer? Your response?"

The voice jolted him from his reverie. The pie disappeared. It was a damn shame.

"Well, of course," said Schumer, his voice carrying the confident tone of a man who hasn't heard the question but plans to answer a different one anyway. "The American people deserve better."

The chamber fell as silent as congressional chambers ever get, which means that only three side conversations and one whispered argument about baseball statistics continued.

"Are you saying you'll oppose our measure?"

Schumer smiled the big smile. He shuffled his papers with grave importance, a technique he'd developed for buying time. The papers, naturally, were blank except for a doodle of what might have been either a duck or a particularly unfortunate rendering of the Capitol dome.

"What I'm saying," he began, pausing to give weight to words he hadn't yet chosen, "is that we must consider all options available to us as we move forward together in the spirit of bipartisanship that has always characterized this august body."

The Caucus senators nodded sagely.

In his office, Schumer dictated a press release to his aide.

"We stood firm against Republican overreach today," he declared, while simultaneously signing off on the Republican bill with a pen that had been gifted to him by a grateful oil lobbyist.

"But sir," said the aide, her eyebrows forming a question mark, "didn't you actually vote for their measure?"

Schumer looked at her with the patient expression of a man explaining calculus to a golden retriever.

"In politics, my dear," he said gravely, taking a celebratory bite from a piece of pie that had materialized on his desk, "it's not what you do that matters. It's what you say you almost did."

The pie was mostly air.