Today’s most ha-larious political news (in the Washington Post, via Ezra Klein at TAPPED) involves the Republican reaction to incoming House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer’s announcement that the House would eschew the previous late-Tuesday to mid-Thursday work week, and actually require Members to show up five days a week, much like the rest of the American work force.A Republican House Member from my home state of Georgia supplied the Post with the richest comment: “‘Keeping us up here eats away at families,’ said Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), who typically flies home on Thursdays and returns to Washington on Tuesdays. ‘Marriages suffer. The Democrats could care less about families — that’s what this says.'”At the risk of taking this fatuous comment too seriously, I would note that the abbreviated work week might have worked fine for a Republican Congress that did very little, and where Members who weren’t committee chairs or in the leadership had no particular role. But if Democrats truly want to ramp up the productivity of Congress, asking Members to spend at least half their time on the job doesn’t seem terribly unreasonable.More broadly, this idea that making Congress spend a fair amount of its time in the Capitol is “anti-marriage” or “anti-family,” is, well, a bit counter-historical. Before the era of easy commercial air travel, most Members went to Washington for each session and stayed there, typically without their families, often living in boarding houses that served as extraordinarily important unofficial venues for bipartisan comity, legislative deal-cutting, and (at the frequent drink-fests) legendary debates and oratory. We are often told by conservatives that marriage and family were safe and supreme in those long-gone days; wonder how they survived those months of nuclear family meltdown?As a lot of the Republican carping about Steny’s announcement indicates, I suspect the real beef here isn’t about denying Members family time, but denying them officially-paid campaign time. Here’s a revolutionary thought: how’s about making your and your party’s actual accomplishments in Congress your key campaign talking points, instead of demanding that you get to go home for four days each week to Bigfoot it around your district?Just wondering.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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November 8: It Was a Change Election After All
I wrote this insta-reaction to Trump’s victory at New York in the wee hours of the morning, after many hours of staring at numbers and trying to understand them. It’s probably as good an analysis as I can manage days later:
We will be debating the contours of Donald Trump’s comeback presidential victory over Kamala Harris for a good while. Certainly among Democrats, this close but conclusive defeat will be interpreted as flowing from a host of party weaknesses and candidate and campaign mistakes. And Republicans, as winners do, will likely over-interpret their success as representing a watershed victory that will turn into governing coalition that will last for decades.
The simplest explanation, though, may be the most compelling: This was a classic “change” election in which the “out” party had an advantage that the governing party could not overcome. Yes, the outcome was in doubt because Democrats managed to replace a very unpopular incumbent with an interesting if untested successor, and also because the GOP chose a nominee whose constant demonstration of his own unpopular traits threatened to take over the whole contest. In the end Trump normalized his crude and erratic character by endless repetition; reduced scrutiny of his lawless misconduct by denouncing critics and prosecutors alike as politically motivated; and convinced an awful lot of unhappy voters that he hated the same people and institutions they did.
Nobody for a moment doubted that Trump would bring change. And indeed, his signature Make America Great Again slogan and message came to have a double meaning. Yes, for some it meant (as it did in 2016) a return to the allegedly all-American culture of the 20th century, with its traditional hierarchies; moral certainties and (for some) white male leadership. But for others MAGA meant very specifically referred to the perceived peace and prosperity of the pre-pandemic economy and society presided over, however turbulently, Trump. When Republicans gleefully asked swing voters if they were better off before Joe Biden became president, a veritable coalition of voters with recent and long-standing grievances over conditions in the country had as simple an answer as they did when Ronald Reagan used it to depose Jimmy Carter more than a half-century ago.
Just as Democrats will wonder whether a candidate different from Harris would have won this election, Republicans ought to wonder whether anyone other than Trump would have won more easily without the collateral damage to their principles, their sensibilities, and their long-term prospects. It’s true that their craven surrender to Trump made it possible for his campaign to present a unified front that took him far along to road to victory in a polarized electorate, despite all sorts of private grumbling over his countless conspiracy theories and insults to opponents. But it’s not clear at all Trump can bring the kind of change he came to represent to his voters. Indeed, the millions of people for whom inflation became not only an economic handicap but a symbol of government fecklessness could easily and quickly become disillusioned with Trump’s strange mix of protectionism and tax cuts if, as economists warn, it will rekindle inflation and spark global economic warfare. It’s a particularly troubling sign for the GOP that so many potential Trump hirelings and allies have wildly conflicting expectations of what he will actually do.
But for now, Trump’s unlikely comeback coincided almost entirely with an election in which voters wanted change enough to ignore or embrace the dark side of his legacy and agenda. It’s his luck and probably this country’s misfortune, but there’s nothing for it but to move ahead with fear and trembling.