On the menu today: My colleague Dan McLaughlin asked what’s wrong with Congress, and he offered a laundry list of senators and House members behaving badly in ways that seem well outside the norm — as if the halls of the chambers had been overrun by the latest batch of freaks on Big Brother or one of those other conflict-as-entertainment reality shows that, if watched in sufficient quantity, will turn your brain into oatmeal. But there’s a common thread that runs through almost all of the recent embarrassing congressional scandals: a strikingly deep-rooted attitude that once these idiots got elected to Congress, the rules, and even the laws, no longer applied to them. Why is populist anger spreading so quickly? Because members of Congress keep throwing gasoline on the fire. Ironically, self-identified populists are some of the worst offenders here.
I’ll Tell You What’s Wrong with the People in Congress, Dan!
Yesterday, my sharp-minded colleague Dan McLaughlin — superstar of C-SPAN — asked the question, “What Is Wrong with the People in Congress?” You are forgiven if you expected a 14-part series that will quickly be turned into a book — or perhaps a 30-book encyclopedia.
But I noticed there’s a common theme that runs through almost all the examples Dan gives. In case after case, we see members of Congress insisting that the rules that apply to everyone else shouldn’t apply to themselves. The word that keeps applying to these lawmakers’ decisions and behavior is contempt — contempt for the law, the rules, their colleagues, their constituents, and for the public at large. It’s as if these lawmakers see the rising smoke from a populist prairie fire and choose to irrigate the landscape with gasoline.*
Or perhaps they see themselves as the top beneficiaries of a system that is sputtering and about to collapse, and are grabbing all the perks and rewards they can before it does. They certainly aren’t acting like they’re the inheritors of a great tradition of self-government, the temporary stewards of a fragile system that must be preserved for the next generation to inherit.
New Jersey senator Bob Menendez has always left a trail of slime behind him wherever he went, but Dan observes, “Somehow, after the feds raided Menendez’s home and found all this incriminating evidence that pointed to him selling out his country, Chuck Schumer let Menendez keep on chairing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for 15 months.”
Remember, the indictment against Menendez isn’t just for taking garden-variety bribes, it’s for acting as an agent of the Egyptian government:
Menendez provided sensitive, non-public U.S. government information to Egyptian officials and otherwise took steps to secretly aid the Government of Egypt. For example, in or about May 2018, Menendez provided Egyptian officials with non-public information regarding the number and nationality of persons serving at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Egypt. Although this information was not classified, it was deemed highly sensitive because it could pose significant operational security concerns if disclosed to a foreign government or made public.
Later that same month, Menendez ghost-wrote a letter on behalf of Egypt to other U.S. Senators advocating for them to release a hold on $300 million in aid to Egypt. Menendez sent this ghost-written letter to Nadine Menendez, who forwarded it to Hana, who sent it to Egyptian officials.
That’s about one step away from espionage!
If you’re an ordinary government worker with a security clearance, you can lose that clearance for a whole bunch of reasons — failure to address financial issues, lying in any way on any official form or during a polygraph, or imbibing illegal substances. The FBI raided the Menendez home and found the $480,000 in cash, the gold bars, and the rest back in June 2022. If you were an ordinary government worker and the FBI raided your home and found a fortune that you couldn’t plausibly explain, do you think you would keep your access to classified information for the next 15 months? Me neither. They’d aim to revoke it in the next 15 minutes.
There’s one rule for senators like Menendez, and another rule for the little people. And hey, we’ve seen that attitude at work for non-Senate elected officials with giant stacks of classified documents in their bathrooms, as well as next to their Corvettes.
(By the way, did you know that Menendez’s daughter, Alicia Menendez, is a weekend anchor for MSNBC? She’s pledged to recuse herself from coverage of her father’s indictment.)
Then there’s New York congressman Jamaal Bowman, who began the weekend insisting that he didn’t know what a fire alarm would do, and yesterday insisted that his staff didn’t understand who the Nazis were. These are lies, of course, but if we take Bowman at his word, he and his staff are too dumb to have any role in shaping U.S. laws.
But falsely pulling a fire alarm is against the law, and whether Bowman is charged under D.C. law or federal law, he should be facing serious fines and jail time. Illegal obstruction of congressional proceedings — you know, the felony that a lot of the January 6 rioters are getting charged with — would get an ordinary person up to five years in prison. Bowman has yet to be charged with anything, even though the facts of his actions are not in dispute.
Dan’s third example is Colorado Republican representative Lauren Boebert. Look, congresswoman, leave the theater-going carnal exploration for the Alanis Morissette songs.
On September 13, Politico published a profile about how Boebert had “pivot[ed] away from nonstop combativeness” and was “moderating,” and how she claimed she worked well with Colorado’s Democratic senators. That rather generous profile about how Boebert had grown and changed was completed before the theater incident:
The incident report states that after receiving the intermission warning, about five minutes into the second act security officials received “another complaint about the patrons being loud and at the time (they) were recording.” Taking pictures or recording is not permitted at shows.
The report quotes one of the ushers: “They told me they would not leave. I told them that they need to leave the theater and if they do not, they will be trespassing. The patrons said they would not leave. I told them I would (be) going to get Denver Police. They said go get them.”
Boebert initially claimed the only thing she did was take a photo of the show with her cell phone and that she didn’t know that was against the theater rules. As you likely know, the video showed a lot more than that. No one else in that theater was doing what they were doing, and Boebert had been warned. Clearly, she didn’t think the rules applied to her.
If Boebert really wants to be a member of the House, she hides it well. She acts like she wants to be a social-media and reality-show star. There are about 734,000 people in Boebert’s district — which covers communities such as Durango, Aspen, and Pueblo — and they deserve somebody who actually wants the job of representing them.
As for Dan’s fourth example, Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman, I’m glad he has agreed to wear a suit and tie when he’s presiding over the Senate or is on the floor of the chamber. As noted last month, Fetterman was briefly exempt from the Senate’s traditional dress code, but all the Senate staff, pages, and visitors around him were not. Fetterman apparently believed it made sense to require the Senate pages — juniors in high school — to wear “navy blue pants, white long-sleeve shirt, dark blue tie, and black shoes and socks,” even as he walked through the chamber in shorts, sneakers, and a hoodie.
Dan concludes with the late California senator Dianne Feinstein, and notes, “Whatever my political disagreements with her, she spoke, dressed, and carried herself with dignity so long as she was capable of doing so.”
But there are not a lot of jobs where you can continue to work, and refuse to retire, at age 90. And notice that Feinstein did not entrust anything in her personal life to a nonagenarian.
Feinstein’s doctors were not in their 90s. None of her staffers were in their 90s. Her office manager and driver for 20 years — you know, the one reporting to Chinese intelligence — was well below age 90. Senator Feinstein didn’t delegate anything important to anyone in their 90s because most people in their 90s are in a condition where just getting through the day vertically instead of horizontally is a victory. Feinstein understood that age 90 was too old for everybody else to do their job . . . but still believed she, at 90, wasn’t too old to remain in the Senate. In her mind, the rule that you should hang up your spurs and enjoy your golden years by, say, age 80 applied to other people, but not herself.
One more example Dan mentioned in passing: California governor Gavin Newsom is appointing Laphonza Butler, the head of EMILY’s List and a resident of Maryland for at least the past two years, to be the state’s next U.S. senator, serving out the rest of Feinstein’s term. (Notice the perfectly absurd headline on a Maryland news site, “California governor names Maryland resident Laphonza Butler to Feinstein Senate seat.”)
You and I can’t vote in a state where we don’t live. But apparently, Butler can represent a completely different state in the U.S. Senate. Newsom deemed Butler owning a house in California as a sufficient tie to the state. The AP reported, “She is expected to reregister to vote in California before being sworn in.” Yesterday, I noted the regular controversies over representatives who live outside their districts, usually as a result of redistricting changing the district lines, and the representative not moving to a new house when the lines changed. For at least the past two years, Butler has lived roughly 2,300 miles from the California state line.
We keep getting this message: “I’m an elected official, therefore, the rules don’t apply to me.”
Getting elected to Congress doesn’t make you royalty or an aristocrat or a Hollywood star or a CEO or a pro athlete. Your special privilege is the work, and a role in legislating the laws. Members of Congress get $174,000 per year; a $3,000 tax deduction for living expenses; eligibility for the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program; and an allowance for travel, office expenses, staff, and mail. That allowance is calculated using a formula that takes several factors into account, including the size of their state or district and its distance from Washington, and can range from about $1.3 million to about $4.8 million. They get free office space, furniture, and office equipment in the U.S. Capitol and in federal buildings. They get to go on codels — congressional member delegations — traveling on the taxpayers’ dime to foreign countries.
In other words, members of Congress already get plenty of compensation and perks. They don’t need any additional special privileges or exemptions from the law or the rules.
Former North Carolina Republican representative Madison Cawthorn is gone, but I’ll point to him as the Platonic ideal of an idiot who went to Congress wanting to be a star, not to do the actual job of representing his district. Once he lost his primary, Cawthorn stopped doing the work, but kept collecting his paycheck:
Cawthorn’s failure to turn over casework to his successor’s office is getting the most attention this morning, but judging from a report last November, he stopped doing anything related to casework long before his term ended. . . .
Republican Chuck Edwards, who succeeded Cawthorn, spent at least a month trying to get casework information from him. It sounds like the former congressman skipped town and let all his calls go to voice mail.
I remind you, Cawthorn’s last speech on the floor of the House bitterly complained that “America is weak,” and that no one took responsibility or was willing to work hard any more.
We keep saying it over and over and over again, but large swaths of the public don’t want to hear it: Government is not entertainment. It has real responsibilities and real duties. Some of these matters are life and death. You wouldn’t trust a bunch of circus clowns to run the bank where you have your savings account, watch over your child’s health, fix your car’s brakes, conduct your home repair, or investigate crimes in your community. So why do you entrust them with the federal government?
That cynical shrug of, “They all suck, so we might as well get some entertainment out of it all” is exactly the attitude they want you to have. If you lower your standards, the idiots win.
*I realize one problem with this metaphor is that gas is too expensive to throw around willy-nilly these days.
ADDENDUM: I’ll have more about the current National Review webathon tomorrow, but this is a good reminder that if you subscribe to NRPlus, you get to joke around with me on the group Facebook page. Every time there’s a meme about the Jets, folks make sure I see it.
This comedy video from Tom Grossi, depicting Jets and Chiefs fans reacting to Sunday night’s game, starts out funny, and then turns into how I actually reacted throughout the night.