Were I to write about what has most been on my mind over the past few days I would have to write about the opening session of the hundredth and eighteenth Congress of the United States. I spent more time than I am willing to admit watching the mainly dull livestream of the proceedings of the people’s representatives, gathered in conclave in what was frequently if unconvincingly denominated by various of them as “the People’s House,” as they went through the process of electing a Speaker. This process finally concluded in the wee hours of Saturday morning. I missed the denouement because I was in bed sleeping. It is strange that a process can be at the same time both suspenseful and utterly tedious. But there was real suspense. I at least was surprised by the outcome. That outcome was, of course the election of the Honorable Kevin McCarthy of California as the Speaker of the House of Representatives.
There are probably many lessons to be drawn from this messy experience. The ones I draw are not necessarily those prominent in the press. The principal issue that strikes me is the disappearance of effective embarrassment from American politics. Of political lessons, some commentators have stressed the strength of the united front of the Democrats as it opposed the obvious disunity of the Republicans. I am more interested in the former, but I’ll say a few words about the latter first.
The fact that the Republicans were squabbling in public does not strike me as a bad thing in and of itself. There is an important distinction between unity and unanimity. Given the fact that we have in effect agreed to give over the governance of a huge and hugely diverse country to only two political parties, you would be right to be wary of consistent party unity on all important, broad questions. The most unified political parties in the world are those in totalitarian states. There is no Joe Manchin in the North Korean Supreme People’s Assembly, no Lynn Cheyney. A decisive evidence of Stalin’s growing despotism as he consolidated his power was his demand that all Politburo votes be unanimous. There once had been sharp debate and division in that powerful group, with decisions taken by majority vote. But the Republican opponents of Speaker McCarthy were not simply practicing robust democracy, as the spin would now have it. They were trying (successfully) to exploit the circumstance of a tiny Party majority to impose their distinctly minority demands. Ordinarily it seems a well established political truth that you cannot beat somebody by running nobody against him. But it turns out, under certain circumstances, that you can do so by electing him.
If you remember, McCarthy was supposed to be a shoo-in for this job at least as long ago as the political demise of John Boehner, who resigned from the speakership in the fall of 2015. Was there any length to which he would not go to secure it? I had not at first been able to credit that anyone, even a politician, would be willing to abase himself so publicly for so protracted a period—fifteen tedious ballots in the end; but of course I should have known better. My dear old dad had a wonderful appraisal of such situations. “What would embarrass him,” he would opine, “would shame a hog to death.”
When I stopped to think of it, though, Mr. McCarthy was at best an also-ran in the self-humiliation sweepstakes. One of the peculiarities of the situation of having no Speaker of the House for several days was that the newly elected representatives, whose formal induction as member of the People’s House it should have been the new speaker’s task to supervise, just had to hang around. First there was the awkwardness of how they themselves were to vote. It seemed obvious that they deserved a vote. On the other hand, it seemed obvious that they didn’t, since they had not yet been officially received. I think maybe the famous Rules Committee needs to give this matter a little thought as it gets dangerously close to Catch 22 territory. But I digress. Everybody was waiting for something to happen, but I presume the waiting of the newbies had a special quality of its own. Among this group one man was already a celebrity. Quite often there is a special buzz about one or two of the newly elected members. I am sure you well remember the preemptive fame that greeted New York Democrat representative-elect (14th District) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2019. There was great excitement about her youth, her dynamism, her unapologetically radical political ideas. The AOC buzz was, in my view, highly affirmative. This year’s buzz, sounding more like a hiss, surrounds New York Republican representative elect (3rd District) George Santos.
Representative-elect Santos is the Baron Munchausen of American politics. He himself has admitted to somewhat inflating the resumé he presented as a political candidate. This can hardly shock us. A certain amount of self-aggrandizement is expected of political candidates, expected and tacitly tolerated. Even on the frontier there can scarcely have been a large enough supply of log cabins (the mandatory birthing sites of all serious American politicians for about eighty years of our history) to accommodate the demand. In my part of the world, when I was a lad, an unstated prerequisite for running for the governorship of Oklahoma was an indeterminate but not insignificant quotient of “Cherokee blood” pumping through one’s arteries. (This is now optional but still desirable for politicians from Oklahoma; you may remember Senator Warren’s .00096%--iffy.) Naturally all candidates like to be war-heroes, baby-rescuers, bootstrap-lifters, but of course only a few actually are.
The new Dishonorable Gentleman from Queens is not among the few. He has taken things to an altogether new frontier of prevarication. The list of his self-promoting lies is awesome but also a little pathetic. The idea that you would pad your resumé with non-existent employment at Goldman Sachs boggles the mind—at least my mind. How about the Navy Seals, or the Tottenham Hotspurs, something along those lines? The only hope for the new Republican leadership in the House is that Santos, who has lied about practically everything else, is actually lying about being a member of the Republican Party. But he did vote for McCarthy, and since McCarthy was elected by a single vote.…In one of the several different livestream sessions I saw, the camera was following George Santos as he wandered aimlessly around the periphery of the House chamber. In the Middle Ages lepers were required to carry a constantly tingling bell that would alert anyone in the street of their presence or approach. I had never actually imagined how this might work, but I now have a pretty good idea. Mr. Santos appears not merely to have been “cancelled” by his new colleagues, but actually rendered invisible to them. The possible criminal charges against him in Brazil at least acknowledge his existence. There is a grandeur about Shakespearean ambition and certainly a flare to the iniquity the Bard’s villains deploy in pursuing it. Why must our own Macbeths and Iagos be so dull and predictable? Goldman Sachs?
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