It’s A Lot More Than 20

When you hear someone caterwauling about how “twenty holdouts” are holding up the election of Kevin McCarthy to be speaker of the house, you are hearing someone whose lips probably move when they read the cereal box.

The “only 2o people” argument assumes the will of the American people is being thwarted. Do you know many people who are big KMac fanboys? I have hundreds of politically-inclined acquaintances and I don’t know one. Did America cry out for Kevin? Did we elect him? No.

What’s the average public approval rating for Congress? Pretty much what the approval rating for Southwest Airlines was around the holidays. Is McCarthy House royalty? Yes, for about a decade.

Look, I’ll be the first to say that the “20” appear to have shot before aiming. No good plan, no popular candidate (or any candidate) to unite behind, and an ever-evolving list of demands. Despite their poor strategizing, their resistance to being force-fed the uniparty guy is healthy and overdue. At least someone is trying to make the world’s most-watched deliberative body actually deliberate, and debate, and you know what, that’s supposed to be “messy” and “chaotic”.

In our system, it’s not a virtue when you take your marching orders and fall in line. There’s some gloating over on the Democratic side of the House. Fine, ok. But you guys fell 100 percent in line behind the leader-candidate handpicked by your outgoing leader. I should be impressed?

Way back when, my eighth-grade history teacher extolled the heroism of a woman named Jeannette Rankin. Rankin was a pioneering suffragist who became the first woman elected to Congress, from Montana, in 1916. She served only two terms, 1917-1919 and 1941-43, but those terms happened to coincide with the declarations of war for WWI and WWII. She voted no both times; in the latter case, she was the ONLY no vote. She was a pacifist, but my teacher’s point was not that Congresswoman Rankin was right or wrong about entering those wars. Instead, the point was that casting these extremely unpopular votes represented acts of conscience. You can imagine the fury and condescension of her colleagues toward this woman.

Now, someone will say, Jack, Rankin didn’t prevent or hold-up our entrance into the wars, and that’s true. My point is that either we think conscience trumps obedience, or vice-versa. Time to decide.

Both parties have dangerously lost touch with us, when they think elected representatives’ first loyalty is to their “caucus”, or when they stage an “election” but there’s only one candidate for whom voting is “appropriate”.

There’s more than twenty of us who want no part of business as usual.