It’s been an interesting week on Capitol Hill, to put it mildly…
I’m probably going to try going forward to put a lot of things mildly; if anything the last few years taught us, it’s that you can’t go nuts in the crisis of the moment, lest you have nothing to meet the next crisis likely to pop up a few hours later…
There are probably a lot of hot takes out there already about what happened and why. Some of these may even be right-
Okay, probably a lot of them that discuss how little to expect from the next session. When you have one-dimensional characters like the loudest of the lot giving you the rundown of how they want to make it all about themselves, there’s not a lot you can second-guess them on. We have all the times we’ve seen announcements by terrible people about what they were going to do, then watched as they did it. The only surprise is that the audience assumes that they aren’t going to do horrible things this time, thinking it’ll be better.
Cue the Charles Schultz characters…
So, with fifteenth being the charm, the house got a new speaker, while the leader of the minority party had a few remarks that went out well after midnight.
And boy, did Rep. Hakeem Jeffries give a strong set of them:
While the speech in toto is worth watching or listening to, it’s how he wrapped the piece up that’s really worth noting. There’s some great writing in it where he compares Democrats in the House of Representatives with the other party, and lists how his side of the room will differ from those across the aisle:
“House Democrats will always put American values over autocracy,
benevolence over bigotry,
the Constitution over the cult,
democracy over demagogues,
economic opportunity over extremism,
freedom over fascism,
governing over gaslighting,
hopefulness over hatred,
inclusion over isolation,
justice over judicial overreach,
knowledge over kangaroo courts,
liberty over limitation,
maturity over Mar-a-Lago,
normalcy over negativity,
opportunity over obstruction,
people over politics,
quality of life issues over QAnon,
reason over racism,
substance over slander,
triumph over tyranny,
understanding over ugliness,
voting rights over voter suppression,
working families over the well-connected,
xenial over xenophobia,
‘yes, we can’ over ‘you can do it,’
and zealous representation over zero-sum confrontation.”
It’s a brilliant piece of writing, no matter what you may think of where it came from. And looking at how right-leaners characterized it, the way they tried to gloss over this section says a lot about how they felt about the call-outs.
We like to think that once upon a time, we had great orators who gave fantastic speeches. We tend to assume that those days are gone, that we can no longer expect to find good writing when a politician takes to the mic.
After hearing this one, that assumption may need to be re-thought…
James Ryan 