Patrick McHenry: In like a thespian, out like a Madisonian
Asked whether his parents, when naming him, had a sense of history or a sense of humor, Rep. Patrick McHenry, a North Carolina Republican, says: Yes. Twenty years in Congress have taught him verbal parsimony when answering questions.
Patrick Henry said: “Give me liberty or give me death.” McHenry says: I chose to be part of the churn. When he arrived in 2005 at age 29, he was Congress's youngest member, and he acted like it. He leaves without regrets or rancor but with “a grateful heart” for
“what the institution has taught me”: patience. He arrived as a thespian; he leaves as a Madisonian.
The crux of democracy, properly practiced, is persuasion, which does not offer the instant gratification of spouting on cable television or social media. McHenry emphasizes this by brandishing his smartphone, which he holds gingerly, as he might a tarantula: it is, he knows, something dangerous to the institution he is leaving. He is repentant about his past spouting.
Persuasion requires patience. As does something the public says it hates but actually hates the absence of: politics. Which is the give-and-take of bargaining for incremental gains. What the public sees, and despises, is performative posturing by people who believe, or see political profit in proclaiming, that they stand between the republic and apocalypse, which is forever just around the corner. Persuasion is too time-consuming when democracy is about to die in darkness.
McHenry looks younger than his years because his default facial expression is of mild amusement. He is not, however, amused that “the tone of party meetings is very different” than when he arrived. Members always act as though “everything is on the line” and every day is “the end of time.” This is exhausting and eventually embarrassing because the world, oblivious of Capitol Hill melodrama, spins on.
McHenry's maturation as a legislator involved coming to terms with the permanence of disagreement. But as he was doing so, large factions of both parties' congressional caucuses were deciding, for different reasons, that accepting this permanence is foolish.
As Judge Neomi Rao of the of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said in an American Enterprise Institute lecture, pluralism “is a deep fact of the human condition.” As the sainted James Madison said, the causes of factions are “latent” in human nature: Everybody has opinions, and everybody prefers his or hers to others'. Congress's challenge is, Rao says, to maintain “peaceful pluralism.”
Though McHenry's end-oftime colleagues think peaceful coexistence with progressives is suicidal, progressives think pluralism is, strictly speaking, stupid. Rao says they — Woodrow Wilson and his ideological spawn — thought, and think, “that experts could find the `right' answers to social and economic problems” and “could, and should, impose them.” So, “the administrative zeitgeist is fundamentally at odds with pluralism” and the “ubiquity of administrative action” is a concomitant of congressional “lassitude.”
McHenry's two congressional decades have seen an intensification of the institution's long transformation from an assertive body capable of “drawing all power into its impetuous vortex” (Madison, Federalist 48) to what political scientist Daniel Stid calls a “willing pushover.” As Richard M. Reinsch II of the American Institute for Economic Research says, Congress now specializes in “open-ended divestitures of legislative power … that direct federal agencies to regulate in the `public interest' or to make policies that are `fair and reasonable.'”