Lame-duck legislatures are wheezing, limping creatures, best buried fast and forgotten quickly.

The lame-duck session of Congress that began and ended fast in the aftermath of a stunning midterm election was of a different breed. It is best understood not as the last gasp of some old order, but as a first cry of the new.

To see what Washington will bring to America these next two years, study well this robust lame duck. It built, on the foundation of a measure ostensibly meant to secure the homeland, a mighty totem to the special interests.

It is a glorious monument, full of riches barely imagined (in fact, not seriously considered) before the election earlier this month. Its details are exquisite.

For companies who renounce their U.S. corporate citizenship and locate offshore expressly to avoid paying American taxes, Congress set aside an earlier proposal to bar them from getting government homeland security contracts. Our elected representatives now are on record supporting the unalienable right of expatriate businesses to profit off the American government, while effectively practicing tax evasion.

For those crackerjack screening companies that did so well at airports before Sept. 11, 2001, Congress bestowed special liability protection from lawsuits. The screeners were deliberately left out of several earlier lawsuit-protection measures, like the one applying to airlines. But the companies that employed somnolent checkers and paid them less than fast-food flippers persisted. Their special favor, said Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., kept popping back up like "that little mole you hit with the mallet in a whack-a-mole game." The mole won.

For the drug industry, the legislative ornamentation reached high rococo. Smallpox vaccine makers, whose products may or may not be forced upon the population at large, would be exempt from lawsuits brought by those who are sickened or killed from the vaccine. Even those who don't get the shots, but do get sick from exposure to someone who was vaccinated, would be unable to win compensation from manufacturers. The injured would have to beg the government, and taxpayers instead.

And still this does not match the grandeur of a provision written on behalf of Eli Lilly. It would ban suits, including those already under way, from parents who believe their children suffer autism due to exposure to a preservative Lilly manufactured for childhood vaccines.

No one argued - who would dare? - that this had some bearing on international terrorism. Nor on homeland security. No one, for that matter, was sufficiently bold to come forward as the artist of this handiwork.

And could there be a symmetry more perfect than the awarding of billions in special breaks for the drug industry, lined up alongside the determined decision to cut off unemployment checks for jobless workers three days after Christmas?

Despite bipartisan Senate approval of an extension of benefits to the long-term unemployed (there are, in this slowdown-we're-not-supposed-to-call-recession, more long-term jobless than in any recent downturn), the House simply refused. Its leaders decided on Friday they'd better catch an early plane and some early football instead. And President George W. Bush, who now gets whatever he asks from Congress, just didn't ask.

So right after Christmas, an estimated 830,000 jobless workers who have been stuck without jobs in an economy that is stuck in neutral are to lose benefits. Beginning Dec. 29, some 90,000 additional jobless workers each week will lose their benefits, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which has been tracking expirations all year.

It so happens that the smallpox vaccine-indemnity provisions in the homeland security bill will cost the taxpayers about $2 billion over the next 10 ten years. It so happens that extending unemployment benefits, because of the cyclical way in which the unemployment trust fund works, would cost about $1.6 billion in the same period. And the money for extended benefits is, at the moment, sitting in the trust fund waiting to be withdrawn.

But you know, it's not the money. It's the thought that counts. And the thought--the thought to remember above all others--is that no one on Capitol Hill will notice, or no one will care.