To resolve the federal government shutdown, Congress resorted to an ancient tool: a stick.
Susan Collins, a Republican senator from Maine, held a meeting with about two dozen lawmakers in her office. Senators who wanted to speak, she told reporters, were only allowed to do so if they were holding a special stick.
Collins would then take the stick from one senator and give it to the next who wanted to speak.
“As you can imagine, with that many senators in a room, they all want to talk at once,” Collins told reporters on Monday. “I know that shocks you.”
The stick was described by the New York Times as “a Masai tribal talking stick”, a gift to Collins, a centrist Republican, from Heidi Heitkamp, a Democrat from North Dakota.
“Sometimes people passed it person to person but generally I tried to control the stick,” Collins said.
The bipartisan group involved was credited with helping end the shutdown, after discussing potential compromises and raising them with Senate leadership.
Chris Cuomo wasn’t impressed with Susan Collins’ stick @ChrisCuomo pic.twitter.com/9duitmZHHs
— Fabian Rivera-Chávez (@FabianRChavez) January 23, 2018
Talking sticks have been an effective tool for indigenous cultures in Africa and North America for centuries. The senators, though, struggled to adapt to such a simple process.
According to Politico, a glass elephant on a shelf in Collins’ office was chipped after Lamar Alexander, a Republican from Tennessee, “forcefully tossed” the stick to Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, after Warner interrupted him.
Shortly after that, the senators switched from the stick to a rubber ball.
