Hello everyone! I hope you had a great holiday season. The holidays are one of the busiest times of the year for my business, so I’ve been off the wagon on writing. But let’s dive back in:
In an earlier post I expressed some pessimism about what our party would do with the opportunity the American people bestowed upon us in giving us back the keys to the House. While I continue to believe there’s a real opportunity for conservatism to refocus on solving problems for regular people, I expressed worry in that post that our current crop of elected Republicans would fritter away their time on things that don’t matter to everyday people. What a lost opportunity that would be for our party.
Well, we’re one week into the 118th Congress, and… they’ve somehow managed to underperform my most pessimistic expectations. If 15 votes over several days is what it takes to get a Speaker, what’s it going to take to get anything meaningful done? Based on the way this all went down, I assume the next two years are going to be full of the kind of showboating about nonsense that makes everyday people give Congress an approval rating below what they give flying cockroaches.
The thing is, some of the pushback from the holdouts in the drama was about process rules in the House. I actually have a half-written piece about all the things I would change about the way the House conducts its business. That technical governance stuff is almost lethally boring to most people, and that’s okay, but it’s super important, and it’s a big part of why the House is so bad at getting anything useful done.
Unfortunately, most of the process changes look like they’ll make things worse, not better. For example, now any one person in our caucus can make a “motion to vacate the chair”, (i.e., kick Kevin McCarthy out of the job of Speaker). The thing is, in a group of 221 people, no matter what you’re doing, *someone* is really upset about it. There’s going to be a motion to vacate the chair about every 300 milliseconds in this Congress- that’s my revised pessimistic expectation.
By the way, as a former Congressional candidate whose district covered parts of 2 counties, I now sit on both of those counties’ Republican central committees. In one, there is a range of perspectives, ranging from somewhat moderate to quite conservative, but everyone makes an earnest effort to be productive together, and in that county, events are becoming better and better attended, fundraising is going up, and the group’s level of effectiveness is steadily increasing.
In the other central committee, there is a range of perspectives, ranging from somewhat moderate to quite conservative, but the group is very factionalized, there’s a lot of bitter personal history between members, and the group is constantly torn by infighting. In fact, in our last meeting, someone stood up and actually made a motion to vacate the chair. The chairman survived the ensuing no-confidence vote 17-12, but 90% of that meeting was infighting, and only 10% was anything useful. With a ratio like that, effectiveness is much more elusive.
That’s the kind of ratio I observed while watching the House work this week. Instead of an earnest effort to be productive together and advance sensible conservative policy, what they opted for was a lot of infighting and showboating for media exposure. So effectiveness from that group looks like it’s going to be pretty elusive. Perhaps I’ll be wrong about that; I’d love to be wrong about that, frankly.
But I probably won’t be.