Mushy, not muscular

Searching last week for “muscular moderation,” my new and futile obsession, I found instead French Hill and other mushiness.

This was Tuesday morning. Maddog wrestler Jim Jordan, a Trumpian insurrectionist from Ohio, was the front-runner to be the new House speaker.

He would be the first House speaker to have supported a coup to overturn an American presidential election. So this was big.

Jordan was intending to force a vote around noon.

The United States would soon need a functioning legislative branch, even if it was the one we have. Another government closure loomed. The situations in Israel and Ukraine would soon necessitate legislation.

Reports were that hard-liner right-wingers acting in Jordan’s behalf had leaned heavily on House Republican moderates to vote for him or face the direst Republican consequence. That would be harsh words on Fox, where a prime-time host, Sean Hannity, had been moonlighting as a lobbyist and kingmaker by making calls for Jordan.

The spiel was that the House needed a speaker urgently and no one except Jordan had a short-term shot at getting the votes.

Constituent calls by the thousands were coming into congressional Republicans’ offices demanding votes for

Jordan. They had been activated by what Hillary Clinton once called—accurately, despite the ridicule—a vast right-wing network.

Well, she called it a conspiracy, not a network. Either way, it is vast and organized. It can slander a Democrat and scare a moderate or mainstream Republican politician worried about being what they call “primaried.”

Moderates cast a lot of votes while holding their noses.

The Washington Post was running online Tuesday morning one of those live update columns—a stream of consciousness on the Jordan story contributed to by reporters on the scene Tuesday morning at the Capitol.

There was this entry: Rep. Ken Buck, an anti-Jordan force from Colorado, related that, at a House GOP caucus meeting the afternoon before when Jordan was trying to persuade holdouts, French Hill of Arkansas had asked Jordan openly if he now believed Donald Trump had lost the presidential election in 2020. Buck said Jordan avoided an answer. He added that Hill was committed to vote for Jordan either way.

Our guy French might have been doing the right thing, but turned out to have been merely curious.

Later, Hill indeed voted for Jordan, who lost 20 votes on the Republican side.

But one of the four House Republicans from our state—Steve Womack from northwest Arkansas—joined the 20. Womack said he did not approve of the way Jordan undercut Steve Scalise after Scalise got more votes than he in the first Republican nominating caucus.

I was reminded of the story I heard years ago about members of the state congressional delegation visiting one at a time with a visiting home-state delegation of public-minded seekers of funds for Arkansas health programs. All the members were nice if noncommittal—except for Womack, who burst in and bellowed pre-emptively that there was no money and that the homefolks might as well face that fact.

Womack was not a moderate in that pronouncement. He was muscular, though, in a truly conservative sense.

Compare that to the positioning of U.S. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, Republican from a suburban Philadelphia district that Joe Biden carried.

Fitzpatrick is co-chairperson of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus that I have extolled. He has more co-sponsorships of bills with Democrats than any other Republican in Congress.

No one calls him Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or even Joe Manchin. But I had thought of him when challenged to produce the name of a so-called moderate Republican who would be acceptable to Democrats as the House speaker at least until the next election.

Thank goodness I did not write that. Fitzpatrick voted for Jordan on that first ballot. He explained afterward that he felt he had to do it because the need to produce a speaker—any speaker— was closing in.

Fitzpatrick also was offended that moderate Democratic friends in the Problem Solvers, also more mushy than muscular, would not cross the aisle to vote to keep McCarthy as speaker on the basis that he did the right thing in keeping government open.

Iwas reminded of a social media post the day before by U.S. Rep. Jared Moskowitz, a Florida Democrat. He lamented that Jordan appeared at that point to be primed to get elected speaker. And he added, “Moderates will cave. They always do.”

Later, I could not remember where I had seen that phrase, “moderates will cave.” I searched for it online. It turned out to be a common phrase representing a general truth about moderates.

They, dedicated as they are to a resolution, will, under duress, settle for a bad solution simply to avoid not having any solution.

We need a few center-leaning moderates from both left and right who possess the muscularity of Womack. We need a new moderate manifesto, something like “extremism in pursuit of moderation is no vice.”

But moderates do not talk that way. Mostly they fret.