Dear America,
The week before last, an energy appropriations bill came up for a vote in The House. The appropriation was bipartisan and non-controversial, but even with the majority under his control, Paul Ryan couldn't shepherd the bill through to passage. But that is not what is important about the bill and the vote. What matters is the hypocrisy that the whole event demonstrates. Before discussing what happened, some predicates have to benoted.
The Republicans took control of The House in 2010, their tenure starting in the session that began in January 2011. The majority that the Republicans currently enjoy is 247 to 188, a majority being 218 of the 435 member body. Thus, the Republicans can pass any bill they can agree upon with votes to spare. But the Republican Party has been divided by the
ascension of the Tea Party movement in our politics, and there are enough hard-core, Tea Party reactionaries in Congress that the rational party majority is no longer a majority of the body as a whole, which allows the Tea Party delegation to thwart the Republican juggernaut whenever they choose. That is why Paul Ryan is now the Speaker of the House instead of John Boehner. Boehner was a hard-core conservative, and a political hack as well, but he wanted to govern, so he prevented the wholesale amendment of bills by the recalcitrant minority of the majority, which they were insistently using to try to steer the Republican caucus even farther to the right...like to the Attila-the-Hun right. By doing so, they stopped any progress on anything, and eventually Boehner decided it wasn't worth the aggravation anymore, so off he went to his favorite golf course to lower his handicap and augment his tan. Then came Paul Ryan...kicking and screaming, I might add. He wasn't interested in inheriting Boehner's aggravation, so he told the hard right that he would, but only under certain conditions (and implicitly that they had better not try any funny business with him). In return, he was willing to allow their amendments: all of them. But last week, that funny business started anew.
What happened was that a military appropriations bill, entirely bi-partisan and lacking in opposition, came up and a Democrat tried to attach an amendment to the bill banning discrimination against LGBT people. At first, the amendment passed, but the leadership held the vote open until they could twist the arms of seven Republicans and make them change their votes, which caused the amendment to fail, so the appropriation passed without it. Then last week, an energy appropriation bill came to the floor and the Tea Party amendments started to fly: let the North Carolina legislature endorse anti-LGBT ordinances it wanted to without jeopardizing federal funds, roll back the clean water act, take some half-hearted measure relative to the California drought, and while doing all those things, ignore the Flint, Michigan lead-in-the-water crisis. But the Democrats floated an amendment of their own codifying President Obama's executive order to ban discrimination against LGBT people by federal contractors. And since The Speaker had promised to allow all amendments, what they call a "return to regular order," he couldn't prevent the amendment from being voted on. But the outcry from their home districts made those seven congressmen think twice, so that when the amendment came up for a vote again, it passed in spite of the arm twisting. Then, when Ryan called the vote on the appropriation bill, it was defeated. The Republicans defeated their own bill, albeit with Democratic support based on opposition to the Republican amendments that had preceded the vote, and all this occurred because the new Republican Speaker gave in to the reactionary right where his predecessor had refused. But now comes the hypocrisy.
Ryan was embarrassed by this fiasco, so he went before the press, Kevin McCarthy (he
is the Republican who failed to win the Speakership because he is so terminally
stupid that he admitted that the Republican governance agenda was dedicated wholly to thwarting the Democrats at any cost by embarrassing Hillary Clinton in any way they could)
standing just behind him and blamed the Democrats. Of course, he saw no culpability
in his own party. He condemned the Democrats for voting against a bill that contained one of its own amendments, claiming that their sole motivation was to interdict the appropriations process, but he never mentioned the several Republican amendments...none of which belonged in an appropriations bill that they had nothing to do with...not to mention that the appropriations bill was a Republican bill voted down by a House of Representatives in which they have the unassailable majority. The problem was not Democratic obstruction; it was conservative bigotry and the abuse of the amendment process in furtherance of bigotry, which process Ryan himself agreed to, that opened the appropriations process up to this nonsense. But admitting the frailty of his own ideas isn't Ryan's strong suit. So here we still are with a Congress crippled by institutionalization of abuse of the rules that the members themselves have created, with the majority leadership continuing to be either unwilling or unable to do anything but point fingers at the minority despite the obvious fact that the Republicans control their own fate and everyone else's too, and this is what they chose to do.
A long time ago, I lived in Boston, and the governor of the state was a Republican named Frances Sargeant. He was a good governor...a humanist,and I voted for him...twice. Massachusetts also had a Republican senator named Edward Brooke. I voted for him too. I am not a blind partisan by nature, but I couldn't vote for a Republican today, not just because I disagree with them on policy, but because they are casuistic equivocators, cavilers, whiners, blame shifters, intellectually dishonest, and frankly, liars. Despite protests from both Donald Trump and his party, he is a perfect example of Republican integrity, or more aptly, the lack thereof. That's why I won't be voting for any Republicans this year.
Your friend,
Mike
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