A more vivid microcosm of the simpleton cowardice of Republicans in Congress, including the cowering quadruplets from Arkansas, would be hard to imagine.
It all happened so suddenly, so spontaneously, so transparently.
Here's maybe the best way to begin telling it: Florida Republican congressman Vern Buchanan had joined all 26 other Florida congressmen, including 15 Republicans, in sponsoring a resolution to name the federal courthouse in Tallahassee for a recently deceased Black federal judge, Joseph Hatchett. The judge served in the Marines, represented the NAACP in civil rights cases and became the first Black member of the Florida Supreme Court. He passed the bar in 1959 in an exam given in a hotel he couldn't stay in because of Jim Crow laws.
The resolution came up on the House floor, where outcomes are always known in advance. This would pass. It was as routine as routine could get. You had a notable and admirable man. You had a major state's entire delegation proposing to name a building for him. You had white conservative politicians proposing the feel-good exercise of honoring a Black man. That's always a political winner for politicians trying to find some basis to declare themselves racially evolved and defend against other votes not so evolved.
Buchanan voted against the resolution. The one he co-sponsored. Reporters asked him why. He replied, "I don't know."
Scores of his GOP colleagues also had voted against the resolution, among them French Hill, Steve Womack and those two other what's-their-names from Arkansas, denying the two-thirds majority needed for passage.
As some Republicans began voting against the resolution, others decided they needed to vote against it as well, because ... well, just because. No contemporary Republican wants to appear insensitive to these GOP concerns suddenly unfolding, whatever they were.
Any indication of herd mentality, of jumping off the bridge because others were, or of a cancel culture of the right, would be--oh, what's the word? True. That's the word.
What had happened was that a first-term right-wing Republican congressman from Georgia named Andrew Clyde, a religious fundamentalist gun dealer who had called the insurrection a tourist event and voted against an anti-lynching bill--just a real peach, in other words--began sharing with his GOP colleagues a discovery by his staff. It turned out that this Joseph Hatchett, as a federal appeals court judge in 1999, wrote an order overturning a Florida public school policy of permitting student-approved prayer at football games.
There is the longstanding precedent that organized prayer in school is unconstitutional; that a public government entity can't impose religion in that way, because America is a free-religion country. The attempted get-around in Florida was that the prayer would be student-approved. A lower court fell for it. The appeals court, with Hatchett doing the writing, said the Supreme Court precedent still reigned despite the attempted finesse.
But the legal issue isn't the point. This was about Republican members of Congress getting last-minute digital communications from one of them, the fundamentalist gun dealer from Georgia, that they were on the verge of honoring a man who had been against school prayer.
And that's not actually the point. It's that, once one gun-dealing extremist in the conference invoked school prayer, Republicans became fearful that someone would say they were insufficiently devoted to school prayer, thus to Jesus. That's except for those like Buchanan, who didn't know the supposedly substantive reason they were changing their votes, but only that the curious actions of their colleagues were leaving them so very afraid.
It all tied into an online dialogue I had with a reader the other morning. I had written that day that I wanted to understand conservatives, and could broadly, but that three things were forever a mystery: Why they fell for the Donald Trump-Sarah Sanders con; why they condoned insurrection, and why they resisted the most rudimentary and logical regulation of so-called "ghost guns" made from kits sold without serial numbers or background checks.
A thoughtful man wrote to reply. He began, "I are one," meaning an Arkansas conservative. He said he had no use for Trump or Sanders and wanted the Capitol invaders of Jan. 6 jailed. He said he was a conservative because he believed that God believed that marriage was one man and one woman and that a person with one set of private parts declaring as one of the other set of body parts was a tiny anomaly not requiring any new laws or political advocacy.
The problem arises if he and the like-minded base their entire political positioning on those narrow elements of surely broader religious thinking. As long as they remain single-issue voters, or narrow-issue voters, and as long as they drive energy and turnout on the right, Republican congressmen will be found trembling deep under the covers because they thought they might have heard something in the darkness.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.