God Save the Debate
By GAIL COLLINS
Next week the House Republicans are going to vote to repeal the health care reform law. It’s a symbolic gesture they got the right to make when they won the majority, but it would be nice if they could leave God out of it.
I am thinking about you, Representative Steve King of Iowa. On Friday, King gave a 58-minute-and-20-second speech on the floor of the House in which he made it abundantly clear that God did not want more federal regulation of health insurance companies. “We will carry on this struggle until in God’s good time, with all his power and might, he steps forth to the rescue and liberation of our God-given American liberty,” King declared.
The Republicans have set aside seven hours for debating the repeal, but once one side has announced that God is their co-signer, there’s really not a whole lot more to say.
We are going to be hearing a lot about Representative King in the coming year. “I have more words in the Congressional Record than anyone else,” he bragged during an interview with a newspaper in his district. And he is one quotable fella. Just the other day he jumped into the health care fray to defend his party’s leadership against a Democratic attack, declaring that Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor had “established their integrity and their mendacity for years in this Congress.”
King also got into an argument about whether insurance could be regulated as interstate commerce, claiming that some people are born, live their lives and die in one state without ever having one single encounter with health care. When a Democrat demanded to know where you could find a baby born outside a hospital without a midwife’s assistance and with no inoculations, King retorted: “I hate to tell you, but they show up in garbage cans around this country, sir.”
King was in line to be chairman of the House Judiciary subcommittee on immigration this year, but the Judiciary chairman, Lamar Smith, decided he’d rather go for someone who did not walk into the Capitol on Day 1 waving a bill to eliminate citizenship rights for children born in this country to parents who are illegal immigrants. Score one for the new civility.
And kudos to Representative Darrell Issa, the incoming head of the powerful House Oversight Committee. This week Issa turned over a new, more collegial leaf by taking back, sort of, his recent claim that BarackObama
is “one of the most corrupt presidents of modern times.”
Which was certainly not charitable. Particularly from the party that gave us Watergate, the Iran-Contra Affair and Warren Harding.
What he actually meant to say, Issa explained, was not that Obama was on the take, but that “when you hand out $1 trillion in TARP just before this president came in, most of it unspent, $1 trillion nearly in stimulus that this president asked for, plus this huge expansion in health care and government, it has a corrupting effect.”
So it was all about big government! Much less appalling. Although, did you notice that the first trillion came while somebody else was in office? Issa could at least have added, “and obviously, when you look at it that way, George W. Bush and Barack Obama were two of the most corrupt presidents in modern times.”
Kudos to the Democrats for their spirit of charity in the matter of the two House Republicans who missed the swearing-in ceremony because they were at a celebration elsewhere. Which they insisted was not a fund-raiser, but simply a gathering of 500 constituents who paid $30 apiece to get there.
The lawmakers, Pete Sessions of Texas and Mike Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, did raise their hands and recite the oath of office in front of the televised version of the event. But really, what if we’d all done that? If I’d known it was an option, I would definitely have sworn myself in and then gotten my picture taken with John Boehner.
Plus, Sessions and Fitzpatrick violated the parliamentary rules set down by Thomas Jefferson. If Jefferson had wanted representatives swearing in front of a flat-screened TV, he would have said so. Those founding fathers knew what they were doing.
Things got more complicated when it turned out that Sessions, unsworn, had gone to a committee hearing and voted to set rules for the debate on repealing the health care law. (Fitzpatrick went to the House and took part in the reading of the Constitution.)
To make sure the rules were still legal, the House had to vote to straighten everything out, which it did very speedily and — this is the important part — without all that much Democratic sniping about what had come to be called “the undocumented members.” This was obviously because people have decided that in times of great conflict and stress, it is better to be collegial.
Also, the Republicans permitted only four minutes of debate.
I am thinking about you, Representative Steve King of Iowa. On Friday, King gave a 58-minute-and-20-second speech on the floor of the House in which he made it abundantly clear that God did not want more federal regulation of health insurance companies. “We will carry on this struggle until in God’s good time, with all his power and might, he steps forth to the rescue and liberation of our God-given American liberty,” King declared.
The Republicans have set aside seven hours for debating the repeal, but once one side has announced that God is their co-signer, there’s really not a whole lot more to say.
We are going to be hearing a lot about Representative King in the coming year. “I have more words in the Congressional Record than anyone else,” he bragged during an interview with a newspaper in his district. And he is one quotable fella. Just the other day he jumped into the health care fray to defend his party’s leadership against a Democratic attack, declaring that Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor had “established their integrity and their mendacity for years in this Congress.”
King also got into an argument about whether insurance could be regulated as interstate commerce, claiming that some people are born, live their lives and die in one state without ever having one single encounter with health care. When a Democrat demanded to know where you could find a baby born outside a hospital without a midwife’s assistance and with no inoculations, King retorted: “I hate to tell you, but they show up in garbage cans around this country, sir.”
King was in line to be chairman of the House Judiciary subcommittee on immigration this year, but the Judiciary chairman, Lamar Smith, decided he’d rather go for someone who did not walk into the Capitol on Day 1 waving a bill to eliminate citizenship rights for children born in this country to parents who are illegal immigrants. Score one for the new civility.
And kudos to Representative Darrell Issa, the incoming head of the powerful House Oversight Committee. This week Issa turned over a new, more collegial leaf by taking back, sort of, his recent claim that Barack
Which was certainly not charitable. Particularly from the party that gave us Watergate, the Iran-Contra Affair and Warren Harding.
What he actually meant to say, Issa explained, was not that Obama was on the take, but that “when you hand out $1 trillion in TARP just before this president came in, most of it unspent, $1 trillion nearly in stimulus that this president asked for, plus this huge expansion in health care and government, it has a corrupting effect.”
So it was all about big government! Much less appalling. Although, did you notice that the first trillion came while somebody else was in office? Issa could at least have added, “and obviously, when you look at it that way, George W. Bush and Barack Obama were two of the most corrupt presidents in modern times.”
Kudos to the Democrats for their spirit of charity in the matter of the two House Republicans who missed the swearing-in ceremony because they were at a celebration elsewhere. Which they insisted was not a fund-raiser, but simply a gathering of 500 constituents who paid $30 apiece to get there.
The lawmakers, Pete Sessions of Texas and Mike Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, did raise their hands and recite the oath of office in front of the televised version of the event. But really, what if we’d all done that? If I’d known it was an option, I would definitely have sworn myself in and then gotten my picture taken with John Boehner.
Plus, Sessions and Fitzpatrick violated the parliamentary rules set down by Thomas Jefferson. If Jefferson had wanted representatives swearing in front of a flat-screened TV, he would have said so. Those founding fathers knew what they were doing.
Things got more complicated when it turned out that Sessions, unsworn, had gone to a committee hearing and voted to set rules for the debate on repealing the health care law. (Fitzpatrick went to the House and took part in the reading of the Constitution.)
To make sure the rules were still legal, the House had to vote to straighten everything out, which it did very speedily and — this is the important part — without all that much Democratic sniping about what had come to be called “the undocumented members.” This was obviously because people have decided that in times of great conflict and stress, it is better to be collegial.
Also, the Republicans permitted only four minutes of debate.
