By now, the speaker of the House role has been given to Rep. Mike Johnson, who for some reason was voted in unanimously even among the Republican Party’s Never Trumpers. I sure did not see that coming. But whether it’s Johnson, Kevin McCarthy, Jim Jordan, Byron Donalds, Steve Scalise, or someone else, the 22-day struggle for House speaker demonstrates that power is up for grabs in the GOP.
Republican representatives hailing from varied parts of the United States, with diverse cares and interests, were jostling to carry the gavel. In contrast, a Pelosi speakership endured for — how many decades? Any political rumble among Democrat representatives for the position was never allowed to see daylight. Meanwhile, Democrats are all sure, years in advance, down to every single member from coast to coast, that their choice is Hakeem Jeffries?
What gives?
Does this not resemble some kind of lynchpin in a hierarchical and rigid organization? A single queen of a bee colony? A “Dear Leader”?
Both Pelosi’s and Jeffries’ politics give me chills to begin with, but the certainty among each of the 209 members of the Democrat caucus that this one man is the one is downright odd and says weird things about the far-left party in our country and what it represents.
A House speaker battle that shows some movement and fight is a good thing. Will the new speaker be from Ohio? From Louisiana? From California? Where will he stand on mandate regulations? Freedom? Borders? Spending? War? Tax? This month, we got to see.
A preordained coronation of Jeffries is, instead, a giant, looming question mark. And as for those who coronate him — who are these people? What do they believe, and what do they loyally serve so monolithically?
Democrats, answer this. What is this already-knowing stuff years before even being likely to have a whiff of winning the House again? Who the heck says in advance that Jeffries or anyone else will be right for the job when an opening he can fill comes up, and why?
The pre-pre-nomination that he enjoys can’t possibly be because he’ll be best for the country when his chance arrives. The actual country is free, dynamic, and intra-competitive.
What the DNC’s rigidness on speaker means is that its plan is long, increasingly global, foreign at the price of American taxpayers, and the same, no matter what the people here are actually experiencing and saying today or tomorrow.
“Jeffries. Jeffries.”
It’s like: “Your mask protects me. Your mask protects me.”
Jeffries’ and Pelosi’s generation said precisely that they would do a long march through the institutions.
But did we know that they would march literally like a Buckingham Palace royal guard? No changes. No motion. Fixed.
“Fixed” minds in the House of Representatives and a free people are not well to be mixed. Of course, their secular radical ideology does not believe in free will, so, there’s that.
Listen, fence voter in America. Being reminded that the United States of America is a country of the people and that we don’t all want the same things bursts the bubble of leftists who harbor visions of big government and even bigger Leader.
And burst it should. The people expect our representation to actually be granular and responsive, for our representatives to compete to represent our diversity of interests.
Sure, I had wanted the House GOP to get behind Jordan, but, in his case, he was riding a wave of heightened support in direct relevance to his judiciary work, which much of the constituency of the country cares greatly about. Just for him to get to the nomination took purposeful gumption and an actual engaged movement to push back on the weaponization of government agencies.
Besides being from San Francisco and New York City, respectively, what cares of real people do Pelosi and Jeffries speak to?
If Democrat speakerships spoke for any genuine constituency across America — not unresponsively for some larger utopian, nation-transcending, glorious agenda set at Davos or somewhere — there would be some contesting in the bids for speaker. Revealingly, there is not.
Government without real and independent care for the people’s grievances and for our right to self-rule among peers has been, well, jostled before in American history.