Where was Zeldin?
Where was U.S. Rep. Lee Zeldin when his colleagues in the House of Representatives were voting on the Respect for Marriage Act?
Dunno. Can’t help you. No clue.
Seriously: Despite more than a week of periodic inquiries lodged with his office (phone, email, media portal submission); throwing the question up to the good people of Twitter (nothing helpful, as usual); close study of Zeldin’s own social media feed (see below); and even consultation with the outstanding journalists of Newsday, I have no clear idea why the Long Island Republican was one of only four House members who failed to cast a vote on the measure. The others were Reps. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, Kevin Brady of Texas and Trey Hollingsworth of Indiana; Burgess Owens of Utah voted “present,” which means he at least showed up.
The measure passed the chamber 258-169, garnering yea votes from all Democrats as well as 39 Republicans, including the Capital Region’s Elise Stefanik; the only New York GOP nays were Reps. Joe Sempolinski and Claudia Tenney.
The vote was kind of a big deal, as indicated by the turnout it generated from lawmakers who are not Lee Zeldin. Now that it has been signed by President Joe Biden, the law has officially repealed the starkly homophobic 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which we should remember was signed into law by President Bill Clinton, a Democrat who rarely failed to disappoint the LGBTQ community with his mealymouthed accommodations of those who would keep this segment of the population in second-class status. (See also: the military policy known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”) The Respect for Marriage Act’s most important element was the federal recognition of both same-sex and interracial marriages as being every bit as valid as heterosexual and intraracial unions.
The impetus for passage, of course, was the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision overturning the right to abortion at the federal level, and the stated desire of some of the far-right justices to revisit what they see as bogus rights conferred by past decisions covering the right to marry or even use of contraception. To be sure, Republicans squawked that the new bill was nothing more than an electionseason stunt to satisfy the Democratic base over rights that weren’t imminently in jeopardy. (They used to say that about abortion rights, but not so much any more.)
But anyway — back to Lee Zeldin. There are a few possibilities for why he missed the vote:
He just doesn’t care anymore. Having been beaten by Gov. Kathy Hochul five weeks ago and about to depart the office where he has served for four terms, it’s not out of the realm of
possibility that he’s suffering from the political equivalent of senioritis, the malady that sent me and many of my high school cronies to the matinee of “Rambo II: First Blood” in the days after final exams had concluded.
He was just too hurt. The day before the House vote, Zeldin abandoned his effort to replace Ronna McDaniel as the head of the Republican National Committee. He criticized McDaniel’s re-election as “pre-baked by design” (as opposed to all those accidental pre-bakings that can bedevil the holiday season).
The fate of the GOP was clearly on his mind the morning of Dec. 8. “The Republican Party needs to immediately get far more engaged in every city, including the bluest in the nation,” said the man who did not show up for a vote with significant blue-city interest. “We need to significantly generate earned media, and substantively talk with voters about our ideas to make families safer, kids’ schooling better, and wallets fuller.”
He had to be on “Gutfeld!” (The exclamation point is not mine.) Yes, it turns out that Zeldin’s day planner for Dec. 8 included generating earned media through an appearance on one of Fox News Channel’s finest chat shows, and by “finest” I mean the one that airs at 11 p.m. during the week. I watched as many clips from the show as I could stand but found no discussion of the Respect for Marriage Act — though I watched Zeldin weigh in on the prospect of fight-only hockey as a sport and get razzed for not hating the band Coldplay.
“Gutfeld!” appears to tape in the late afternoon at the Fox studios in midtown Manhattan, which could have made it dicey for Zeldin to actually show up and do his job as an elected House member, then fight D.C. traffic to the airport or train station, travel north and battle his way into midtown to take part along with the rest of the members of the show’s uproarious panel of deep thinkers. Life, as they say, is a series of trade-offs.
There’s some other reason. Maybe he had a doctor’s appointment or oil change he just couldn’t reschedule, or he was 50 pages from the end of a really good novel and couldn’t tear himself away.
Again, absent any response from his office, your guess is as good as mine.