In a shot at their colleagues in the Senate who failed to pass their Obamacare repeal measure overnight, House GOP members reportedly played “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” before a meeting on Friday. “The searches all say they’d have made Whitefish Bay, If they’d put 15 more miles behind her,” the folk tune goes. The Senate sunk before reaching the shore. Appropriately, the nation’s capital was under a flood warning as the afternoon began.
Such antagonism across the Capitol building is a rare grain of normalcy inside the cuckoo silo of Washington, D.C., these days. After the Senate’s most recent Obamacare repeal amendment was defeated, House Republican leaders compared their accomplishment in passing the American Health Care Act to the failure of their counterparts—their historically elite, conceited, dilatory, rarefied, abstruse, intolerable counterparts in the “upper” chamber.
“The House remains committed to finding a solution and working with our Senate colleagues, but the burden remains on the Senate to demonstrate that it is capable of passing something that keeps our promise, as the House has already done,” Speaker Paul Ryan said Thursday evening, before voting began on the opposite end of the street. “Until the Senate can do that, we will never be able to develop a [compromise] that becomes law.”
House majority leader Kevin McCarthy sounded like he was talking to a dog that ate his shoe. “We’re going to have to take a different route based upon the Senate, unless the Senate is able to wake up and realize what they did,” he said, according to Politico.
“The Senate’s failure to act is a letdown, plain and simple,” said Kevin Brady, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, in a statement Friday afternoon.
Rep. Ann Wagner, using G-rated imagery that’s suddenly foreign in an R-rated town, said her colleagues want senators to “get off the dime and get moving.” This Bambi-like exhortation juxtaposed with the prevailing lunacy of Washington—“Reince is a f—ing paranoid schizophrenic” and Trump v. Sessions, Trump v. Mueller, why not Trump v. Kramer v. Kramer—is almost cute. America’s preceding decades were not all halcyon days. But watching the Senate take fire from the House—what the “Torch” himself, Sen. Robert Torricelli, once called “a raucous, undisciplined reflection of public passions”—is like watching history on VHS.
The New York Times wrote more than 18 years ago:
Two-hundred and nine years prior to that, Pennsylvania senator William Maclay visited the House after his chamber adjourned one day to watch members discuss the slave trade. He was unflattering, as the late Robert V. Remini remembered in his book “The House: The History of the House of Representatives.”
“The House have certainly greatly debased their dignity, using base, invective, indecorous language; three or four up at a time, manifesting signs of passion, the most disorderly wanderings in their speeches, telling stories, private anecdotes, etc.,” Maclay wrote in his journal in March 1790. Set this description against the Senate’s long-gone reputation for great debate and oratory; so protective is the institution of its timeless rhetoric that the late Sen. Robert C. Byrd, an historian of his workplace, bound some of the chamber’s great addresses in a book in 1994.
The House is more kinetic, observed former Rep. David Dreier, a Republican from California. “The action-packed nature of the House is more intriguing than 45-minute quorum calls” in the Senate, he said.
Congressional trash talk used to be a bicameral affair; legislative fights pit representatives against senators, not just Democrats against Republicans. The health reform debate has become a throwback throwdown.
