The Capitol has had enough real physical crises in recent years; it doesn’t need punk lawmakers like Jamaal Bowman fabricating even more.
It was a dramatic weekend in Congress, as House Republicans narrowly averted yet another government shutdown. (It’s really only baby steps for the House GOP, since Speaker Kevin McCarthy now has to survive the self-promotional rage of Matt Gaetz and his attempt to vacate the chair this week.) But the drama was punctuated by a surprise: During the final vote on McCarthy’s funding bill and, curiously, while Democrats were scrambling for time to read it in the Capitol, Jamaal Bowman pulled the fire alarm in the Cannon Building, forcing the evacuation of the building and imposing an hour’s delay on the affairs.
Bowman is now attempting to claim he pulled the alarm “mistakenly.” I refuse to rehearse and serially demolish his nonsensical defense because I am tired of being condescended to. The question of whether Jamaal Bowman, a multi-term veteran of Capitol Hill as well as a literate adult in full possession of his mental and physical faculties, intentionally pulled a fire alarm clearly marked “FIRE ALARM” is a misdirection that Bowman and his defenders would prefer you to waste your time litigating. There is no point in doing so. He did it on purpose. You do not do this by accident; there is no possible way for a former school principal whose entire daily life at work was organized around fire-alarm usage and safety to be that “checked out” (unless they are suffering from dementia, in which case they should retire immediately). This is the stupidest kind of gaslighting imaginable.
The only three relevant questions are: (1) What was Bowman’s motivation? Was there some sort of half-cocked plan? Did he yank it in a frustrated rage? (2) Were any of his fellow “Squad” members informed in advance of his intentions? (3) Does any of this matter anyway?
I don’t have the answers to the first two of these questions, nor do I care to speculate, though others with greater investigative capacity (such as the House majority) might want to inquire further. I do have an answer to the third, however, which you may or may not share: No, in the grand scheme of things, Jamaal Bowman pulling a fire alarm to delay a vote doesn’t rise to the level of January 6. But it is an appallingly immature, crassly juvenile stunt, as contemptuous of the voters he works for as it is of the men and women he serves with and the institution to which he was elected. Criminal charges are over-egging the pudding, but bipartisan censure is surely appropriate for a willful act of disruption such as this. The Capitol has had enough real physical crises in recent years; it doesn’t need punk lawmakers like Bowman fabricating even more, whether for political purposes or private gratification.