Some GOP Meltdown

[Valin]

National Review:

The party hasn’t looked this good in ages.

Kevin D. Williamson

November 17, 2015

 

I left the Republican party a long time ago for a number of reasons, one of which is that I didn’t want to be part of any organization that had Arlen Specter as a member. The man this magazine famously named “America’s worst senator” eventually bailed and hooked up with Team Jackass, but I didn’t see any real reason to come back. Still, for all the angst regarding the presidential primary and the endless largely phony us-and-them theater of base vs. establishment, I cannot remember a time since the Alex P. Keaton years when the Republican party has seemed to me so attractive.

 

As you may have heard, earlier this month I was a guest of the William F. Buckley Jr. program at Yale, which was the focus of some truly boneheaded protests. That was silly, and I felt a little embarrassed for the Yale kids. But at the dinner afterward, I felt a little envious of my Republican friends, especially those in Nebraska, when Senator Ben Sasse gave his talk. A very smart young man at my table — a young man not given to political crushes — said that he’d never heard a politician give a speech like that, and he was right: Senator Sasse is in possession of a living mind open to original thought, and he has spent part of his first year in the Senate thinking seriously about what the Senate really is, what it does, and what it should do. That sounds like the sort of thing that everybody in Washington ought to be doing, and maybe it is, but there isn’t to my knowledge anybody in elected office doing it with the intelligence and rigor that Senator Sasse applies to his job. My young friend seemed ready to quit his job and go to work for Senator Sasse; I didn’t blame him.

 

I didn’t think John Boehner was a terrible speaker of the House, given his fractious caucus and the fact that the entire legislative branch is being diminished by an out-of-control executive branch and an imperial presidency, Barack Obama being the most recent and worst exemplar of the phenomenon but not the only one. Now Republicans have Paul Ryan, who has the brain power and the intellectual focus that Newt Gingrich once brought to the job without the grandiosity or the indiscipline. Of course people have their bones to pick with Paul Ryan — he is a legislator, not a talk-radio host, and, as such, he has to work in the real world rather than flatter the prejudices of angry men stewing in traffic jams. Is there really somebody we’d rather have as speaker of the House? (Who actually could be, you know, speaker of the House?) Conservatives love to bitch and moan, but Speaker Ryan is something close to our best-case scenario.

 

(Snip)