In one installment of my Morning Briefing last week, I unceremoniously referred to the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives as a “driverless clown car.” Those of us who have years of experience and frustration dealing with the Republican party know that the description is practically evergreen.
I was mostly referring to the fact that Kevin McCarthy had plenty of time to prepare for his speaker fight and he almost seemed as if he had been caught by surprise when it began.
As the voting wore on and the so-called rebels didn’t yield, I began to enjoy the spectacle of it all. The House is supposed to be more rough and tumble than the staid Senate. We don’t see enough of it though. Sure, we get a lot of screeching from the Dems — especially from America’s Dumbest Bartender and her chirping harridan “Squad,” but that never leads to anything substantive.
At first glance, what happened with the battle for the gavel seems to have yielded some results that conservatives out here in actual America might like. My first real indication of that was seeing the lefties losing their fragile little minds about the concessions made to the holdouts. One of the greatest upsides to a bitterly partisan state of affairs is that knowing what the other side dislikes is all the barometer one needs for knowing what to like. It’s a “the enemy of my enemy” kind of thing.
All too often, our legislators in Washington are in a “go along to get along” mood. They frequently seem more interested in pleasing their colleagues than heeding the desires of the people who sent them there. This attitude is particularly irksome in the House, which was created to be more directly accountable to the voters. Senators don’t have to get their delicate sensibilities dirty around their constituents but once every six years if they don’t want to.
Members of the House have to keep going home and rubbing elbows with us common folks if they want to hang onto their jobs. In theory, that should make them more responsive as a legislative body to the priority of the voters they represent.
Has anyone felt well represented lately, even by someone for whom you voted?
Last week I began to feel as if at least some of them were beginning to “get it.” At first, it was just the holdouts. By Friday night, it was obvious that some lightbulbs were going on in the heads of the McCarthy supporters and they knew that they were going to have to tiptoe outside of their protected Beltway comfort zone.
I felt the greatest sense of this when things were at their most heated late on Friday night. Yeah, the political theater was entertaining; it was also necessary.
While I’m not going to expect a radical transformation in the way our Republican reps behave, I will say that the early results of the intraparty tussling are good. A new rules package was passed that’s loathed by the Democrats. Articles of impeachment have been filed against our amnesty-loving head of Homeland Security. Speaker McCarthy made good on his threat to boot subversive commies Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, and Ilhan Omar from their influential committee assignments.
Not bad for the beginning of the first full week under the new majority.
We are seeing that the hot mess approach to governing can be quite functional in the chamber that was constitutionally designed to accommodate messiness.
When I was an adolescent boy, my friends and I would begin to lose patience with each other during the summer months. We would eventually reach a point where tempers would boil over and we would start punching each other. The fights never lasted long, but they accomplished something: we were no longer on each other’s nerves and functionality was restored to the friendship.
If the House GOP majority needs to throw some verbal punches at each other to expedite things, then verbally punch away.
Now more than ever, freedom loving Americans need to know that there are some people on Capitol Hill fighting for them, even if it’s only a handful. We saw last week what a handful can accomplish. There’s only so much that this slim majority can make stick, especially with the Senate still in the clutches of Chuck Schumer and his ilk. It’s important, however, that they let us know that they won’t be rolling over, no matter what the odds.
Stay scrappy, Republican congresscritters. This isn’t the time for a Kumbaya moment.
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