What is going on with the rageaholics in the Republican party? It’s been said that Donald Trump is the id of the Republican party and this week I believe that more than ever. This past week was Fight Club In Congress. This is not an example I would want children to see of any adult behavior let alone the behavior of lawmakers, who are supposed to represent if not the best in our culture, certainly the upper 25% or so. If this is the upper 25% of American culture right now, it is time for us to lay down now and die. This is appalling.

Where do we start? How about with James Comer? At least that one didn’t get physical, only rude. When asked about the fact that he, too, loaned money to a family member, which is the key malfeasance that he accuses Joe Biden of. he tells the person who’s asking that he “looks like a Smurf.” One more classless comment for the GOP, one more downward plunge for civil discourse in America. And remember friends, this is all getting taken down in the Congressional Record and recorded for posterity. Our descendants will be reading this and weeping — or shaking their heads and laughing at what unspeakable fools we were.

Now that, as surly and low life as it was, was actually this week’s high point. Over in the Senate, Republican Markwayne Mullins said, “Hold my beer,” and proceeded to challenge Teamsters Union boss Sean O’Brien to a fistfight right there in the chamber. Whut?

I think that’s a good point to be made. And it gets worse. We are told that “Mullin turned up on Sean Hannity’s show later to dismiss criticism of him wanting to throw hands during a Senate hearing as “political correctness.” Elsewhere, he reminisced about the age of dueling. At last check he was telling an interviewer that he’s willing to bite during a fight—and that no body parts are off-limits.”

This is beyond nuts — and again, it’s nuts for anybody who is over the age of 18 and is ostensibly a responsible adult. For a lawmaker to talk this way, a public servant, is simply not normal and we cannot allow it to become the norm.

And frankly, I would not be the least surprised if Comer and McMullin are jockeying for a place in the next Trump administration. You know that Trump is home, fresh from attending the UFC, and enjoying this display of idiocy greatly.

And then we get to My Kevin. And that’s where it went beyond mere words and blows were exchanged. Or, at least, an elbow was thrown.

Okay. Let’s pause for a moment and just take a look at this. Maybe, if what Burchett says is true and this reporter says she was standing there and saw it with her own eyes, maybe this is the New Abnormal and it’s going to become okay to physically retaliate against your political enemies. That seems, at first blush, to be the message from these behaviors. And this is not My Kevin’s first accusation of physical altercation. Not by a long shot. The Dispatch:

For months, culminating in yesterday’s apparent cheap shot at Burchett, his behavior suggests a man in denial about his own dispensability and failing to come to grips with reality in increasingly embarrassing ways.

Even in the best of times, he’s allegedly been prone to getting physical with antagonists or threatening to do so. This past summer, after the Republican House majority voted to censure Adam Schiff, fellow Democrat Eric Swalwell attacked McCarthy in a floor speech as a “weak man.” The next day McCarthy reportedly confronted him and warned, “If you ever say something like that to me again, I’m gonna kick the sh-t out of you.”

Supposedly Swalwell replied by calling the then-speaker a word I can’t reproduce in the virtual pages of The Dispatch. Hint: It’s a body part Donald Trump once boasted of grabbing.

There was no fight with Swalwell that day, but Adam Kinzinger claims McCarthy did make contact with him—twice—after he became one of the GOP’s most outspoken Trump critics. What Kinzinger described as being “shoulder-checked” sounds suspiciously like the elbow Burchett took in the back inasmuch as both seem designed to be plausibly deniable as accidents.

Perhaps they were, although it’s strange that such accidents keep happening to McCarthy and keep being misunderstood by the victims.

Remembering how he coped with being ousted as speaker, though, I’m inclined to think the (alleged) shot at Burchett was deliberate.

Recall how McCarthy held court with reporters in a long press conference hours after the House voted to yank the gavel from his hand. There was no shame or visible anger at his unprecedented humiliation; if anything, he seemed as cheerful as he would have in a gaggle discussing government funding. He was no longer speaker—but it felt like he was speaker.

And it kept on feeling that way for most of the next three weeks.

When Steve Scalise won the first vote of the Republican conference to succeed McCarthy, McCarthy’s allies reportedly undercut him behind the scenes. The former speaker went on holding press conferences, sounding every inch a leader of his party on October 9 when he denounced Hamas’ pogrom in Israel. He was asked that night whether he thought he might get his job back and pointedly declined to rule it out.

He continued to occupy the speaker’s office. The sign above the door featuring his name remained in place for weeks. He said he wouldn’t retire from Congress, an unusual move for someone who’d been dumped ignominiously in the brightest of media spotlights.

All the while, his cronies in the House GOP vowed to do whatever they could to see him renominated and reelected as speaker. It’s unclear how involved McCarthy was in that effort but as late as October 24—the day Mike Johnson was ultimately chosen by the Republican conference—he was pushing a plan that would have seen him take back the gavel with Jim Jordan deputized as his “assistant speaker.”

Then, suddenly, Johnson won. And that dream went up in smoke.

McCarthy needs to be out of Congress, yesterday, if this is the way he processes his emotions and deals with disappointment. But I don’t know if that’s going to happen. It seems like threats of violence and actual violence have become too large a part of American culture for a single, simple resignation to carry much weight. McCarthy’s facing a MAGA primary and I honestly don’t know if he’s going to be back in Congress, but certainly this is not the note to end his career there on.

This kind of behavior has to stop in Congress, of that there can be no doubt. Threats of violence are beyond the bounds of normal debate and there is no excuse for physical altercation. I don’t know if there’s something that the Republicans are drinking in their water, that’s making them all crazy, but I do know #GOPClownShowContinues is trending all this week as a hashtag. Wow.

 

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10 COMMENTS

  1. Rageaholics? Perhaps. Tantrum-throwing pre-schoolers? Most definitely. These ‘pubes are whiny-assed crybabies who need to be removed from office ASAP because they cannot, and never could, do their jobs. And their jobs are NOT the stupidity we’ve been observing…well, for a while now.

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  2. Ursula there have been 35,000 gun deaths so far THIS YEAR! These are the folks responsible. I don’t know the accumulative number, since that fascist STOLE the election in 2016, with the HELP of our enemy. It’s a PROVEN fact. Of course the venal character and abject stupidity of tens of million of traitors in our midst not only brought fascism to the white house but to congress. There is no normal left in a country with such low moral character. WE ARE A COUNTRY FULL OF RAGING IMBECILES. The fact the public keeps putting these stunted boys in congress means we are a bunch of chickens voting for the butcher. Until the public gets the sh*t scared out of them, you can expect the new normal to mirror Germany’s slide into fascism and the destruction of our democracy. If and when that happens then I’ll be glad the country is full of military weapons on the street.

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    • Their behavior is the result of the orange make up man. They are starting to talk to people just like he does. I am sickened by the way the magas are acting, and am proud of Bernie corralling them. I don’t wish for military weapons on the streets, but that’s where they’ll be if this continues. How any self respecting moderate republican can sit in the same room with them, is beyond me. If they had a spine, they’d walk out every time the magas act up & show them how foolish they look.

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      • Potter…20 years ago there were 200 million guns on the street, 2% were AR-15 type of weapons designed to kill MANY people at once. Thanks to the NRA/GOP, there are now 400 million guns on the street, and 25% of the sales are AR-15 type weapons. I guess this nation of distracted morons like to turn our children and citizens into hamburger meat at school, at church, at temple, at mosque, at the grocery store, at the bowling alley, at the bar, at parties and gatherings, at concerts, at movies, at the mall, basically everywhere. The people behind it got their blood money. Evidently our fellow citizens are fine with it since they gave congress to the traitors and killers. Believe me, it’s not difficult to pick up one on the street.

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  3. Democracy is like a delicate flower that is to be vigilantly monitored and protected by robust systems that promotes and secures its guardrails, sustenance, lifeblood and heartbeat.

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  4. “The Senate had just adjourned on May 22, 1856, when Representative Preston Brooks entered its chamber carrying a cane. The pro-slavery southerner walked over to Senator Charles Sumner, whacked him in the head with the cane and then proceeded to beat the anti-slavery northerner unconscious. Afterward, Brooks walked out of the chamber without anyone stopping him.

    The caning of Charles Sumner is probably the most famous violent attack in Congress, but it is far from the only one. In the three decades leading up to the Civil War, there were more than 70 violent incidents between congressmen, writes Yale history professor Joanne B. Freeman in The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to the Civil War. It was a time of heightened tensions, especially over slavery—itself a violent institution that would drive the nation to a bloody war.” History Channel

    Senate decorum is not a given. Violence is not uncommon. We are not in unprecedented times. but civil war was the last result.

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  5. “McCarthy needs to be out of Congress, yesterday, if this is the way he processes his emotions and deals with disappointment.”

    Why single out McCarthy? You’ve written about two others who weren’t exactly shy about resorting to violence and name-calling and, um, the “target” of McCarthy’s latest “action” didn’t seem like he was all that intent on letting it slide. Remember, that’s what got Trayvon Martin killed. George Zimmerman was going around following Martin (without any just cause) and when Martin challenged him, Zimmerman shot him (despite having been told NOT to “pursue the suspect”). Burchett deliberately went after McCarthy but why? What did he really hope to gain from it? An apology? What good would that have done? We know that GOPers NEVER apologize for their wrongdoings; they usually double down.

    I’m certainly not making apologies for McCarthy but I’m not going to just take Burchett’s word on the matter. Rude behavior happens all the time (read news accounts of the injuries–even deaths–that happen in stores on Black Friday because shoppers lose their effin’ minds) and SMART people know better than to follow someone who’s bumped into them and not apologized (a lot of time the “bumper” doesn’t even realize they’ve done it), especially in states that are allowing open-carry (and, more frighteningly, concealed-carry) policies. Burchett should’ve just made some snide remark to the reporter and gone on with his day instead of escalating the matter the way he did.

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  6. Perhaps the definitions of the duties of the House And Senate Sergeants at Arms need to be more granular.

    “They are permitted to hold up the silver and ebony Mace of the United States House of Representatives, which typically stands on a green marble pedestal on the Rostrum—where the Speaker of the House presides. If a member becomes unruly, the Sergeant at Arms restores order in the chamber by holding it in front of the offending congress member(s).”

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