September 23: About That House Republican Agenda
I’m certainly old enough to remember lots of these pre-election “agenda” documents, and couldn’t help but mock the latest one at New York:
In Thomas Pynchon’s 1965 cult novel The Crying of Lot 49, a character who has taken too much LSD decides that if everyone on earth repeats the marketing phrase “rich, chocolatey goodness,” it will represent the voice of God. With or without drugs, a lot of people in politics have a similar delusion that getting candidates to make the same noises like chirping cicadas will produce electoral victories. It’s a particularly strong belief among congressional Republicans, who share the dubious conviction that Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America” is what flipped control of Congress in 1994.
With the assistance of Gingrich and former Donald Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, the House Republican Conference has released a new “agenda” document, entitled “Commitment to America.” The document, clearly designed for online consumption, has lots of bells and whistles and factoids about the hellish reign of Joe Biden and his “Democrat” Party. What it doesn’t have is a whole lot of specificity, unlike the unfortunate “agenda” that Republican Senate Campaign Committee chairman Rick Scott released earlier this year to the near-universal horror of his colleagues, who don’t want to be identified with the proposed sunsetting of Social Security and Medicare.
The relatively anodyne character of Kevin McCarthy’s pet project doesn’t mean it is entirely useless. Candidates mouthing the approved pieties will presumably not be expressing their pithy views on Jewish space lasers or repeating QAnon slogans.
Still, it’s hard to take seriously an agenda for the nation that does not mention climate change, Russia, or extremist threats to democracy — or one that suggests the sole cure for inflation is to cut “wasteful government spending” without explaining what that means (in the indictment of Democrats that accompanies the agenda, there is much criticism of direct stimulus payments, which Donald Trump preferred to virtually every other form of government spending).
Most interesting was how House Republicans handled a red-hot issue they dare not ignore completely, given the obsession it commands among a very big chunk of the GOP party base: abortion. You have to look pretty hard to find it, nestled as it is under the unlikely heading of “A Government That’s Accountable,” and the downright misleading subheading of “a plan to defend America’s rights under the Constitution.” And it simply says Republicans will “protect the lives of unborn children and their mothers.” So they checked off a box for anti-abortion activists in the manner least likely to draw curious or unfriendly attention to the extreme abortion views so many of them have expressed, which don’t poll well. Perhaps voters will be too mesmerized by the overall party message to notice. Repeat after me: rich, chocolatey goodness.
Well, I attended a pretty contentious town hall meeting this morning — organized by my congressman, Pete Stark.
Pete Stark, held his own, though. When one of the anti-reform people kept referring to things in the House bill — that weren’t there — Pete tried to reasonable, by pointing out that there was a lot of misinformation about the House bill. But the guy kept interrupting Pete shouting “Have you *read* the bill?! Have you read the bill?!” Finally in exasperation Pete responded, “I WROTE the bill.” That let some wind out that guy’s sails.
The Minutemen were there filming the audience (I kid you not!). For all the right-wing paranoia about the Obama administration taking names, they were definitely pretty creepy about their monitoring efforts.
I was very disappointed by the local Dems, who, although they though handed out pro-reform signs and stickers, they tried to get us all to promise to be polite and courteous. Even though Pete held his own, the right-wing crowd definitely dominated the meeting by their obnoxiousness. You can’t face down bullies by being passive — and any videos of the event would have given the impression that the right wingers were in the majority — when in actuality they were in the minority.
Although the anti-reform bullies may have been a third of the audience (say 50 people out of 150) and dominated the meeting with their jeers and heckling, as they walked out of the hall they had to face a huge crowd of 300 or 400 people (who came too late to get in) who had assembled outside chanting for health care reform. Some of wingnut bluster evaporated when they left meeting seeing so many pro-reform people outside. I noticed a few hiding their signs. Heh, heh.