Congress Is a Middle School Operating Inside a Retirement Home

Have you been watching America’s messiest reality show? The latest episodes have featured backstabbing, power struggles, post-divorce histrionics, salacious gossip, cattiness, and bitchy, self-righteous to-camera monologues. No, I’m not talking about the new season of The Real Housewives of New York. I’m talking about Congress.

In the words of an erstwhile Hill denizen, “Congress has always been a little stupid.”

Not long ago, former Rep. Steve King (R-IA) was fond of bringing a model of his proposed border wall to the floor and displaying it like he’d just done his fifth grade school project on Minecraft.

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There was a 2001 congressional hearing where a Louisiana Republican alleged that Popeye cartoons incited his son to violence.

Or the time that then-House Speaker (and future convicted child molester) Dennis Hastert delivered a press conference—in front of a graveyard—where he defended his mishandling of allegations of sexual misconduct between then-Rep. Mark Foley (R-MA) and congressional pages.

There have been cane fights and brawls, like the 1858 all-out melee over a proposed pro-slavery constitution for the prospective state of Kansas, which involved two anti-slavery Republicans from Wisconsin ripping the hairpiece off of a pro-slavery Democrat from Mississippi.

I don’t think everybody in Congress should be friends with each other, or even act like they like each other. As a voter, I want my representatives to express themselves in a way that is straightforward, honest, and even, if the situation calls for it, a little bit unkind.

But it’s one thing to dispense with the DiFi-embracing-Lindsay Graham civility that makes elected officials seem offensively removed from the consequences of their actions. It’s another when members of Congress act like they lack the capacity for emotional regulation. Like fucking children.

Never in memory has Congress seemed quite this stupid or this childish. Even as the average age of a member of the lower chamber has hovered around 58 years old, sophomoric and emotionally immature behavior from members of Congress continues to blow past precedent. And it’s much more noticeable from one side of the aisle.

The most recent and obvious example is the ouster of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Eight members of the House Republican caucus, angry that McCarthy worked with Democrats to pass a continuing budget resolution to keep the government open until mid-November, relied on the support of Democrats to oust McCarthy.

Bitchy, if not a little hypocritical.

The runup to the fateful vacancy vote was characterized by shouty Republican infighting worthy of a rowdy primary school cafeteria. If there had been meatloaf present, I have a feeling Jim Jordan would have gotten some stuck on his forehead and not noticed for several hours.

That rigamarole was initiated by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), who has never liked McCarthy on account of the fact that McCarthy often gets more attention than he does and also, to be fair, embodies the sort of soulless empty suit power-seeking D.C. archetype that people who voted for Matt Gaetz dislike.

McCarthy didn’t seem to like Gaetz either, on account of the fact that Gaetz is a career attention whore turned political arsonist willing to burn everything down if it will get him a hit on Fox News. (Besides, everybody in Washington knows, firelight is more flattering to the complexion than a Ring Light.)

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And now, in true Real Housewives of Capitol Hill fashion, the gossip has started. Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) just threw it out there in an interview with CNN’s Manu Raju that he and many of his colleagues were personally familiar with photographic evidence of Gaetz’s taste for underage girls, and that Gaetz bragged about taking boner pills and Red Bull so that he could boink into the wee hours. “That was obviously before he got married,” added Mullin. (Of course, Senator. A congressman cheating on his wife? Would never happen.)

Though the Justice Department did not move forward with charges against Gaetz, a congressional ethics investigation regarding the incredibly Floridian scandal is ongoing.

Gaetz responded snidely, saying he hadn’t even spoken 20 words to Mullin in his life, and offered “thoughts and prayers” to Kevin McCarthy’s political career. The congressional equivalent of Mariah Carey’s, “I don’t know her.”

This could all lead to the end of Gaetz’s career in Congress, if his fellow Republicans are irritated enough with Gaetz to throw him out. But Gaetz has already won. He’s gotten attention, like a little boy pooping his pants so that he doesn’t have to go to church.

It’s not just Gaetz.

It’s Rep. Lauren Boebart (R-CO) dressing up like she was going clubbing to attend a Sunday night performance of a touring musical and initiating an over-the-pants handie with her date, and then trying to spin the story like it’s a funny thing that anybody with a free night in Denver and a fondness for Michael Keaton might do.

That’s behavior befitting a high school sophomore who sneaked out of the house to go to the movies, not a 36-year-old grandma-to-be.

It’s Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) dressing like Cruella de Ville and acting at the State of the Union in a manner that would be unacceptable at a youth hockey game.

It’s Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY), who introduced a resolution to expel Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) from the House after Bowman pulled the fire alarm in the Capitol last weekend. This seems childish considering Malliotakis’ previous approach to Capitol security; in the wake of the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, she voted to invalidate Biden’s win and later against investigating the attack.

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It’s Kevin McCarthy opening an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden, with such thin evidence that it would be laughed out of a real court, where adults work.

Republicans lack the skill necessary to govern. But they also are too lazy to do it—because they don’t actually care about the well-being of their constituents, and they know they don’t need to successfully perform the tough work of governance to get a show on Fox News. They just need to be the sort of person who would get cast as the villain on The Golden Bachelor (which, by the way, is a much more serious and emotionally resonant show than C-Span these days)

Congress is rotten with adults who act like children, and while that’s funny to an extent, eventually the antics need to stop and some actual governing should take place. That’s why Congress exists. Not to make viral clips, not to raise money. Not to get in petty slap fights. To govern.