The “Debacle”

We all know that recently the Republican majority took 15 votes to elect a Speaker of the House.  This has repeatedly been described as a debacle, a fiasco, an embarrassment for our country and worse. Couldn’t they get their act together?

I disagree. Why wasn’t the way the Republicans conducted themselves exactly how we would like the process to work?

Of course, it is always a debacle, a fiasco, and an embarrassment for our country whenever we have to watch Republicans do anything. This time it was especially bad because we had to watch the battle between the crazy Republicans and the bat-shit-crazy Republicans. But that was what made the event so sad. It was not the fact that a Political Party was divided.

Isn’t disagreement within a Party, either Party, what we so often ask for? Don’t we always want our Representatives to be independent and not puppets of their respective leaders? Don’t we complain all the time that our political process is too partisan – that we are inseparably bound into our two silos and can never “reach across the aisle?” You see where I’m going here. Didn’t the Republicans last week show us at least some sliver of independence? Weren’t they, at least for a short time, not entirely cabined to their obligatory corner? The shame was that the Republican struggle was between the crazy ones and the bat-shit-crazy ones, not the struggle itself. 

No Democrats left their ghetto. They held hands, sang kumbaya, and praised themselves for their “solidarity.” Is that what we want?

We broke away from the British Parliamentary system, the one that requires all members of a party to vote in a bloc. The original brainiacs who set up our system, didn’t want that. They didn’t even want parties. In his Farewell Address, “Big G” Washington famously called Political Parties enemies of the Republic. The Founders wanted the individual representatives to be elected by the people but to be independent of those same people. They wanted those representatives to use whatever smarts they had to make their own decisions, not to be dependent on a Party “getting its act together.”  

And don’t forget about how this all played out – in public. That’s the other thing that the Broadcasting Bloviators keep carping about. “This should have been done long before they ever got to the floor,” they say.  “McCarthy had two months to get this done,” they say. “And he wants to be a Leader?” they say.

Those criticisms make as much sense as calling Mitch McConnell “studly.” 

We want our government to be done where we can see it, don’t we? At least that’s what everybody says. We applaud all the Sunshine Laws and Freedom of Information Acts and even C-Span for God’s sake, but the conventional wisdom about the Speaker election is to complain because they didn’t make the rules behind closed doors. 

Maybe the lesson from all this is that the Republicans are so contemptible that they made us dislike a process that was operating just the way we want it to.