The rhetorical dust has settled on the business of choosing the new Speaker of the US House of Representatives. It was not exactly what you’d call business as usual, and the usual suspects were quick to feign outrage, and we should not forget.
The alternative to what we saw is lockstep acceptance of business as usual which, given how perennially unpopular the body is, seems like a bad idea.
Terrell Clemmons, the Deputy Editor of Salvo Magazine, had an interesting take or turn to explain why what we saw was – as I and many others noted – how things should work.
Last week, political news was all about the battle for the Speaker of the House that played out over several contentious days and took fifteen votes to settle. Mainstream commentators criticized the “chaos” and “division” and characterized the drawn-out process as a dysfunctional “clown show.”
Without commenting on the political minutiae of it all, I would just ask a question: was that really what it was? Every mother knows that when the toddlers are quietly “getting along” in some other part of the house, she should drop what’s she’s doing right away and find out what they’re getting into.
We might do well to take a similar approach toward elected officials.
This strikes me as precisely what the Founders intended, and these are points made here and across the conservatarian firmament. Getting nothing done at the Federal level has historically prevented more harm than help, with the caveat that it also prevents action to undo previous harms. And that’s critically important. The elites are forever claiming a need to fix what is broken when it is they who broke it. Some would argue, myself included, that this is their entire reason for living.
And we can debate whether any given example is deliberate but simply put, they do use their authority to break things they can then claim to “fix” or that they intend to “fix” if you’ll give them a bit more of what is yours (rights, property, etc.). They’ve flipped the relationship.
The nation was started on the premise that public servants worked for the general populace. The government got its power from the people. These days it is more a matter of codependence. Politicians overstep to perpetuate self-destructive behaviors among the people, who are blamed for whatever they claim ails us. A deficit that has become multi-generational.
Congress has spent so much that does not yet exist that your children’s children’s children will likely have to pay a significant price for it. Fruits of labors not yet borne. Something I have called the true voting rights problem in America. A tax upon ancestors who had no vote in the matter. The result of congress “quietly” getting along.
It’s a dangerous thing, and there are few examples of it that have not benefited “members of congress” at the expense of the people for whom they are supposed to work.