Because U.S. House Republicans turned out to be every bit as dysfunctional as we thought, infested with enough zealots to keep the works permanently gummed up, they are having a devil of a time selecting a speaker of the House.
They can’t get anything else done. Why should anyone have thought differently of the speakership?
U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan apparently could save the day. It appears he could satisfy a few of the zealots with his hard-right bona fides while assuaging those more reasonably conservative with his occasional deal-making practicality.
The only federal budget passed in years was the negotiated work in 2013 of Ryan, as House Budget chairman, and Democratic U.S. Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. Some of the right-wing House zealots seem to like him despite his selling out to the Democratic Satanists in that way.
Ryan has gone home to Wisconsin to think about doing what he obviously has too much sense to want to do.
As John Boehner knew all too well, and as Kevin McCarthy understood, it is a daunting prospect to lead this Republican caucus responsibly.
The elusive task is achieving reasonable accommodations for a functioning government with the Senate and the White House, which would necessarily entail working with Democrats, while, through all that, keeping the 40 or so fringe-right Tea Party types, who believe only in an apocalyptic ideology that disdains compromise, from marginalizing you and making your life a pure hell.
The full House, including Democrats, must actually elect the speaker, and the Constitution does not stipulate that the person chosen by the full House must be a member thereof.
So the full citizenry is eligible.
Some say it may be time to go outside.
U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, who only briefly passed through the House himself, apparently is trying to scare us. He has recommended that the House install Dick Cheney, though Cheney surely wouldn’t be interested on account of the fact that the speaker can’t directly start any foreign wars.
As it happens, I went on social media last week and declared … not my candidacy, per se, but my passive availability.
What I put on Twitter was that, if the 188 House Democrats would vote for me because of my mildly left-of-center philosophy, and if a mere 30 of the 247 House members who are pragmatic and somewhat centrist would also vote for me, then I’d have the requisite 218 votes, and together we would save this country.
The world, really.
I agree, you see, with what President Barack Obama told 60 Minutes the other night: If these dysfunctional House Republicans shut down the government again in a few weeks rather than raise the debt ceiling to keep our bills paid, then the likely deep slide in the U.S. markets could deeply disturb already-shaky global markets. That’s because, truth be known, the Obama recovery has made the U.S. economy stronger right now than just about anyone else’s.
What I offer is essentially a coalition government in the European parliamentary tradition. We’ll put center-leaning elements of the competing parties together, co-opt the left fringe, quarantine the right fringe and set about doing utterly incremental and pragmatic things.
No one has yet expressed the least interest in my offer, which renders my platform, heretofore unannounced, irrelevant.
Nonetheless, here it is:
1 — I vow to do no harm. That means raising the debt ceiling and keeping the government open to stabilize markets and prevent 401k-investing Americans from losing much of what little they’ve admirably managed to lay aside.
2 — I would set an agenda of only small-focus things until we get a new president and hit the reset button. That means no more wasted time on pointless votes to repeal Obamacare merely to give Tea Party types an adrenaline rush.
3 — Conceivably among those small things would be narrowly focused legislation to change — i.e., improve — individual elements of the Affordable Care Act. I have no idea what those might be, unless it would have to do with giving states more direct flexibility in law — not waiver-dependent flexibility — to do as Arkansas has done and spend Medicaid expansion money in self-styled and reform-oriented ways. But there might be other ideas. I’d be happy as speaker to run any ideas over to the White House and to Health and Human Services, and see what comes back.
4 — I have no idea what to do about the Trans-Pacific Partnership, that massive international trade agreement. I want to be for it, because free trade and economic consolidation make sense, but I am weary of American workers getting shafted. So as a nonvoting speaker, I would leave this issue to the spontaneous discretion of the House. I would lead by getting out of the way. But I should acknowledge that I also am thinking a little about adopting the well-worn tactic of my good friend and home-state Republican governor, Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, and appointing a task force.
5 — I would reserve the right to continue writing my columns while serving as speaker, in hopes of gaining national syndication.
If Ryan doesn’t accept the job, and if the best choices are Cotton’s idea of Cheney and my idea of me … well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Maybe it’s not that bad. And maybe it is.
John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.