OPINION:
The overwhelming media narrative these past three weeks has been that Republicans cannot govern because, after 18 rounds of voting in less than a year, they could not pick a speaker of the House — the chamber in which they hold majority control.
The political bed-wetting among Republicans in Washington sounded just as dire.
“We are going to lose 25 seats over our inability to pick a speaker!” they squealed. The Republican Party has just earned its place in the permanent minority — forever, they cried.
But the media narrative and professional Republican caterwauling, as usual, is completely wrong.
Sure, the last few weeks have been embarrassing for Republicans in the House of Representatives. They look like a bunch of clowns arguing over who gets to wear the most colorful clown wig with the largest clown shoes and the shiniest red clown nose in their next parade.
As always, the dorks and weenies of Washington overstate their own importance.
If you asked any normal American citizen walking down the street in any state — no matter their political affiliation — you would not find a single person to list this political tempest in a Washington teacup as the most pressing issue in their lives. You likely would not find a single person who listed this in the top 10 of their most pressing concerns.
Gas prices. The cost of groceries. Mortgage rates. Crime. Interest rates on credit cards. Crappy schools. A new war overseas that their son might get sent off to. Shrinking 401(k)s. Illegal immigration. High rents. Fentanyl-related deaths.
These are the issues Democratic and Republican voters actually care about. But flip on the news and you would think the world was in flames all because Republicans dumped the last speaker and took three weeks to find a new one.
This media delusion is particularly absurd when you try to name the great accomplishments by the House of Representatives in recent years when it has had a speaker.
Did the House attack inflation by cutting government spending? Did it declare fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction and launch a war to stop it? Did it close the border for good?
Of course not.
House speakers over the past few years will be mostly remembered for ushering in the Trillion Dollar Era, when their gargantuan spending bills blew through the trillion-dollar barrier — sparking the inflation crisis now crushing Americans.
At least one good thing you can say about the past three weeks in which the House did not have a speaker is that at least the speaker-less Congress could not spend another trillion impoverishing Americans with debt and inflation.
One final important point. The media and Democrats are eager to blame this chaos in the House on Republicans. But never forget that only eight renegade Republicans voted to dump the last speaker and create this crisis. Every single Democrat in the chamber voted to decapitate the House.
After all, the speaker of the House is not a partisan position. It is a constitutional position explicitly defined as the leader of the House, not one party or the other. Democrats’ best defense for dumping the last guy is that they have more allegiance to their party than they do to the House of Representatives — which is a profoundly discrediting admission.
The funny part is that Democrats dumped the last speaker after he was accused of working with Democratic partisans in the House — a mistake the next speaker would be unwise to make.
The new speaker, Mike Johnson of Louisiana, is one of the most conservative members of the Republican caucus. He is a strict constitutionalist with little patience for politicians who place partisanship over the Constitution.
Speaking to the chamber Wednesday afternoon before he assumed his new responsibility, Mr. Johnson invoked Moses, whose chiseled relief portrait stared down on the proceedings from the wall above. Indeed, if Mr. Johnson can channel the wisdom and fidelity of Moses, he will lead the House of Representatives — and America — out of the wilderness.
• Charles Hurt is the opinion editor at The Washington Times.
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