lucky time The Most Reliable Scapegoat in Politics? Red Tape.

Just before the November election, Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a Democrat from Washington’s Third Congressional District, posted a video explaining why she was running to keep her seat. Unlike many other Democrats, she didn’t talk about Donald Trump or the state of democracy. She talked about fruit. She dressed casually and spoke directly, like one parent sharing a grievance with another at the playground. It all started, she said, when a constituent who worked at a day-care facility complained to her that she was not “legally allowed to peel bananas or oranges for the kids.” Why not? “She said peeling fruit is considered food prep.” (Here Gluesenkamp Perez tightened her eyebrows, as in: Can you believe it?) Even worse, while peeling a healthful banana was against the rules, opening a bag of potato chips was apparently fine.

The congresswoman looked into it. At first, she said, the regulators she talked to gave her the runaround, insisting that this wasn’t what the rules said. But eventually she concluded that it was true: This day care would need to install “like six more sinks” to meet the legal requirements to serve fresh fruit. To Gluesenkamp Perez, this was an absurd example of how regulations that made “good reading on paper” easily went awry in “the real world,” a policy emblematic of “an ingrained disregard for working people by policymakers in D.C.”

After all, how exactly can a pollster know who is “likely” to vote, and who therefore will be the focus of their results? There’s no one right answer, and every polling firm has its own strategy.

As a result, she said, she introduced the “Banana Act,” a bill that would create a “positive right to serve fresh fruits and vegetables in day care.” The opportunity to create legislation like this — “based on the experience of people who change diapers and turn wrenches and drive trucks” — was, she said, exactly why she wanted to serve another term in Congress.

This video is part of a long tradition of bashing American bureaucracy and a perfect example of how easy it can be. Candidates perennially tell us that they’re the ones who understand the pain of being constrained by thickets of red tape — the warriors of common sense who will pick up a machete and hack away at the meddling of clueless elites who gaze down on real life from up high. Sometimes this attaches to much broader ideological zeal, as with the influential anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, who has talked about the federal government — all its rules and the budgets that enabled their enforcement — as a sort of bloated demon, one he wanted to shrink down to a size such that one could “drown it in the bathtub.”

Trump often goes further, casting the entire administrative state as useless at best and a malevolent, corrupt, anti-American fifth column at worst and pledging to empower business-world titans like Elon Musk to hew through it in search of inefficiency. In the aftermath of Trump’s victory, politicians of both parties clearly feel some pressure to communicate that they understand this zeitgeist; Representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, quickly declared himself ready to work with the proposed Department of Government Efficiency to “slash waste.”

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