Column: Take this Congress and shove it! Two fed-up lawmakers say why they’ve had enough
The first news conference Earl Blumenauer held in Washington was a bipartisan affair, featuring the Oregon congressman alongside a fellow Democrat from Texas and Republicans from Illinois and New York.
Their topic: a plea for greater civility in Congress.
“It almost seems quaint now,” Blumenauer said of that 1996 let’s-join-hands moment.
The 14-term lawmaker recently announced his decision to call it quits after 27 years on Capitol Hill, part of an exodus of more than three dozen congressional members rushing the exits rather than seeking reelection. It’s the highest number of departures in more than a decade.
Speaking from his Portland district, Blumenauer said his initial decision to run for Congress was inspired by Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker who operated the chamber with a gavel in one hand and Molotov cocktail in the other.
So it’s not as though Blumenauer arrived in Washington to find lambs cuddling alongside lions.
As “an experienced, not-yet-old politician... I thought I could make a difference,” said the 75-year-old lawmaker, who spent years in state and local government before going to Washington.
Surveys show how vulnerable the 80-year-old Biden is as he seeks a second term. But they say precious little about how the 2024 election will turn out.
Since then, however, the atmosphere has grown incalculably worse, driven in large part by a warring Republican House majority that seems to plumbs new depths of surliness and disorder with each passing day.
“Life’s too short,” said Blumenauer, who plans to pursue his policy interests — public transit being a particular passion — in a less-toxic environment closer to home.
It’s not as though he’s leaving behind a deeply beloved institution.
A recent Gallup poll found a cringe-inducing 13% of Americans approved of the job Congress is doing — and that survey was taken before former Speaker Kevin McCarthy sucker-elbowed a political foe and a Senate hearing on labor issues nearly devolved into a fist fight.
“That’s impressive,” Rep. Ken Buck said dryly of Gallup’s dismal rating.
The Colorado Republican is also among those opting against seeking another term, after nearly a decade as a House lawmaker and a stint in the 1980s as a staffer for then-Rep. Dick Cheney. He’s had enough, Buck said, of the name-calling and juvenile behavior.
“There’s a part of me that wishes that I had served during a different era of Congress, a more productive time,” the congressman said as he motored through his district, which sprawls outward from the Denver suburbs.
“I worked very closely with a lot of Democrats and built very good friendships on a lot of important issues. But it just didn’t happen enough.”
Buck has been notably critical of fellow Republicans parroting the lie about a stolen 2020 election, or whitewashing the attempted government overthrow on Jan. 6 — proving it’s possible to be a staunch conservative and still live and work in the real world.
“There are some Trump people that got elected to Congress that are just baffling,” Buck said. “They just don’t belong in Congress. I don’t know how else to put it.”
Who’s to blame for turning the House into a Boschian hellscape?
Buck names Trump as well as former Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He says the San Francisco Democrat too often personalized political differences.
Blumenauer, among the most liberal House members, agrees with the part about Trump. He also blames the destructive influence of cable TV and social media, which create a warped incentive structure that rewards bombast and conflict over thoughtfulness and compromise.
“Increasingly, we’ve got people who aren’t interested in being serious partners to govern,” Blumenauer said. “It’s all performative. It’s [saying] the most outrageous things possible, which gets them airtime on... Fox News and MSNBC and TikTok.”
The former House speaker, saying she’s liberated, discusses her love of the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones and the healing power of music.
Despite it all, the Oregon Democrat described himself as “pathologically upbeat” and suggested there’s a way out of today’s slough of congressional dysfunction.
It starts with nonideological issues — things like roads, bridges and bike lanes, which Blumenauer has focused much of his career on — and using agreement in those areas to build trust.
“What needs to happen, I think, is for us to be able to take a deep breath and focus on an agenda of inclusion and reform,” he said. “Different rhetoric and work hard to get bipartisan partners.”
Buck is less upbeat. He suggests it may take something shattering and awful to bring the country together and snap its fractious politicians out of their puerile antics and self-centered scuffling.
“America is never as united as when we have a crisis,” Buck said. “After 9/11, everybody was hugging and kissing and putting the country first. So sometimes you just need a crisis, as horrible as that is to say.”
Hitting bottom can be the first step toward recovery. Perhaps we’ve reached that point with the current Congress, run by nihilists and narcissists who can barely perform the basics responsibilities of choosing a functional leader and keeping the government up and running.
It’s hard to see how things can get much worse, though in today’s Washington anything is possible.
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