In a season of global gloom, with carnage continuing in Ukraine, the Covid epidemic spiking to unimaginable levels in China, catastrophic food shortages emerging, and climate change triggering natural disasters around the world, the United States earlier this January managed to provide everyone with a brief interlude of comic relief.
For better or worse, one can anticipate that Washington will produce more – much, much more – of the same sort of comedy over the next two years.
The Speaker election fiasco
To start the year strong and to give a clear indication of what is to come, the Republican Party managed to turn the administrative formality of picking a new Speaker of the House of Representatives into a week-long spectacle of high (or low?) farce. Having eked out only a surprisingly narrow victory in last November’s midterm elections, the Republican Party immediately and conclusively eliminated any doubt about its inability to translate into constructive action whatever mandate it might think it has.
A small handful of relatively junior Republican Congressmen -- including some of the looniest of the looneys, and in the American House of Representatives, the competition for this particular distinction can be extraordinarily tough -- managed to hold their party’s leadership, and the House as a whole, hostage, in an impressive display of narcissistic hypocrisy. All comedies must come to an end, though, and after 15 rounds of voting this one did. But to ensure sequels, the House Republican leadership brought the Speakership fight to a close only by capitulating to all of the rebels’ demands – including a procedural concession that ensures the rebels can repeat this process of holding the Speakership hostage whenever they, or others, feel the whim to do so.
For pure surrealism, however, the Speaker election fiasco pales in comparison to the exquisitely drawn-out torture of revelation that a newly-elected Republican Congressman has apparently manufactured his entire personal history – not simply anecdotes about how co-workers and his mother died, but his religion and ethnicity, important details regarding his sexual preferences, where he went to high school, where (or whether) he attended college, where he was employed, his personal finances and source of income, and, yes, even whether he has a criminal history.
At this point, the only things known for certain about him are that he has indeed been seated in the House of Representatives, that he voted in favor of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and that Speaker McCarthy finds nothing surprising or objectionable in the “embellishments” of the representative’s resume. How much senior Republican Party leaders knew about the completely fabricated life history of its candidate prior to the election and chose to keep secret from the voting public remains to be discovered (and embellished?). For journalists and comedians, this is a gift that will certainly keep on giving.
Material for late-night shows
In a darker vein and with deeper and longer time horizons, the various legal quick-sands that are slowly swallowing former President Donald Trump and his network of closest associates promise to provide loads of nasty-spirited and sometimes nasty-minded entertainment. A different presidential candidate, Ross Perot, once famously described the sucking sound in American politics as being the sound of American jobs being sucked into Mexico. The sucking sound that will for the next several years be the background to the carnival music of American politics will be that of the former president being slowly sucked into the quagmires of his personal and business life.
Newscasters and bloggers are guaranteed a continuous supply of the images, and sounds, of an angrily struggling, increasingly desperate but ultimately doomed, heavily capitalized, pathological tweeter with which to titillate and amuse the American public on any otherwise-slow news days. That the former president can find ways to continue to make this sad spectacle humorous is a final testimony to his amazing political talents.
To be clear, the fact that the Republican Party is providing the lion’s share of the material for late-night hosts these days is not to be taken as an indicator that the Democratic Party is less capable of providing this kind of entertainment. In fairness, it is simply that the Democratic Party does not possess, at this exact moment, quite the same level of comedic talent, nor -- given that the best writers of lunacy, like Q-Anon, currently seem to cater more to the right than to the left – does it have the same quality of off-the-shelf (off-the-wall?) material with which to work. Any of this, though, could change at a moment’s notice.
At least it is comedy
Does the comic-opera nature of American politics matter? Arguably, both “no” and “yes,” but mostly “no.”
There was, after all, never any hope that any significant, new American policies would emerge in the next two years. The divided nature of American politics – a Democrat in the White House; Democrats controlling the Senate, but without the supermajority needed to pass most legislation given Senate rules; Republicans running the House of Representatives, at least after a fashion; and a conservative majority in the Supreme Court ready to strike down any “progressive” legislation – ensured deadlock. The comic episodes we are witnessing are merely icing on a gridlock-cake firmly set in concrete.
On the other hand, the early indications are that the dysfunction in the House will not only reinsure that nothing new happens but also mean that routine, ongoing matters do not get handled in a timely fashion. Passing appropriations bills – the legislation that allows money to be spent – is more likely than not to prove to be impossible, and Congress will, not unusually, need to resort to “continuing resolutions” which allow agencies temporarily to continue to spend at prior-year levels. More immediately, Congress now also faces the rite of raising the government’s “debt ceiling,” an action necessary if the government is going to borrow more money to pay interest on existing debts. Failure to do so may result in the spectacle of another government “shut-down.”
But none of this is new territory for the U.S. government. There are ways to muddle through. Perhaps more significantly, at present the comic theater seems to be limited to the legislative branch. Whether one thinks the executive branch’s policies are or are not wise, there is still a relatively high degree of monotonous absence-of-humor in what the executive branch is doing and how it is doing it.
Critics of American foreign policy, American domestic policy, and the American political system in general may complain that what we are witnessing on the American political stage is to be deplored, and that this is no way for a great power to behave. Perhaps. But would one prefer a great power that operated and behaved like China or Russia?
Admittedly, American-style liberal democracy may unintentionally degenerate from serious theater to badly-written comedy, but at least it is comedy rather than tragedy. As with many grade-school productions, one may feel an overwhelming urge to either weep or laugh, but at least laughing is an option.
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Edward Rhodes is a professor of Government and International Affairs at George Mason University. Rhodes is best known for his research into the philosophical and cultural roots of American foreign and national security policy. Rhodes served for six years on the U.S. State Department’s Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation, the Congressionally mandated, nonpartisan body that reviews and certifies the official, published account of American foreign policy for completeness and accuracy.
