Dear America,
Hillary Clinton having shown her mettle at the Democratic debate this week, her next test will be her testimony before the congressional Benghazi committee, which has already been discredited by one of its leading lights, former presumptive Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, and by a military man fired by the committee for his refusal to persecute rather than investigate. As Ms. Clinton said at the debate, the committee is a naked attempt to legitimate the Republicans' political operations against her, and there are now two insiders who have said so. As long as she doesn't present them with an unanticipated gaff of profound proportions, this testimony is just an exercise in illumination of the Republican Party's quintessential partisan corruption of our democratic processes. But while Clinton is more or less home free, the hearing is just one of two showcases for Republican ineptitude and political reprobation. There is still the matter of electing a new Republican spear catcher to be Speaker of the House.
Most notable in this latter struggle is the fact that The Speaker's gavel has been a sought-after implement of power for two centuries now. You may remember in the past...the recent past considering John Boehner's rise to, and struggle to keep, the position...that there has always been more than one aspirant to the "throne" and the politics of the majority party have been evinced in the news that has emanated from what is in general an intra-party contest. But now, and for the first time in my memory, while there are two aspirants, Chaffetz of the Tea Party and Webster of who knows what other than obscurity, neither of them has a chance. The only person who might be elected is so wary of leading his own party that he has steadfastly refused to be considered. I have never heard of someone being begged to be Speaker of the House, much less of anyone saying he would not serve when asked. Between Benghazi and this hot-potato Speakership debacle, the Republicans are wearing their baser instincts and qualities on their collective sleeve. That old-foot shooting pistol is loaded for bear this time, and I don't see how the party can fail to shoot off at least a few toes before the next presidential election in 2016.
Ryan's position is entirely understandable given his own ambitions and the constituencies rearing their heads within the Republican caucus. As to the former, there has been only one Speaker who has been elected president: James K. Polk in 1844. While Ryan has never shown a particular presidential ambition other than accepting the wing-and-a-prayer nomination for the Republican vice-presidential spot on Mitt Romney's ticket, he is only 42, and after this stint on the House Ways and Means committee, of which he is the chairman, he will have a lot of "congress cred" that could easily be converted to presidential timber. The conventional wisdom is that he has always wanted to chair the Ways and Means committee and that now that he is there, he has no other ambitions, but how many times have you heard that one. But whether Ryan's arm gets sufficiently twisted that he commits presidential suicide by becoming Speaker, and whether he has higher ambitions or not, the Republican struggle to find a willing victim is telling, and sooner or later, the American electorate will have no choice but to notice the effete and epicene nature of the party. Their only tactic of choice is vilification of the opposition with a claim to be on God's side in every respect as a backdrop. But the American people are in favor of a woman's right to choose, a more liberal immigration policy under which those who contribute to our society are welcomed in as citizens, fairness in the work place and a more equitable system by which to allocate wealth than the one that the Republicans have cobbled together over the past 35 years. That Republican legacy includes a tax law that the progenitor of the "modern" Republican Party, Ronald Reagan, bragged about simplifying, calling his re-edification of U.S. tax law "the new American Revolution" by dint of its putative simplicity. Since then, sops for the wealthiest Americans have crept in along with some that Reagan himself designed, like lower taxes on capital gains than on real, earned income. And I am convinced that there is a limit to the ability of the Republicans to fool some of the people all of the time with this supply-side, let's let the rich deduct their jets from their taxes so that they can create more jobs nonsense; note that they never explain the connection between the rich getting richer and the prosperity of the rest of us other than to postulate that the rich are magnanimous and they will do the right thing by investing their wealth in our future. So, the cloak of righteousness behind which they hide seems to be wearing a little thin and frayed around the edges, which means that whether they like it or not, this problem with electing a Speaker allows the American people to see behind the curtain. My guess is that they won't like what they see.
Your friend,
Mike
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