Purity

Perfect.
Baby every little piece of the puzzle doesn’t always fit,
Perfectly.
Love can be rough around the edges, tattered at the seams.
But honey if its good enough for you,
It’s good enough for me.
If your mother doesn’t like the way I treat her baby boy it’s alright. It’s alright.
If in every wedding picture, my daddy looks annoyed it’s alright. It’s alright.
Don’t you know that all the fairy tales tell a lie.
Real life and real love doesn’t have to be perfect.

Perfect  - Sara Evans

…..

As I write this, a Speaker of the House has still not been chosen. Obviously, I did not experience this in my time in Congress since it has been 100 years since that last time this choice went beyond the first ballot. That said, I am very familiar with the sort of mentality that has caused this inter-party gridlock to occur.

Before I get into that, let me point out that the thing that makes members of the minority party the happiest. Be they Democrats or Republicans, you are very happy to see the majority in disarray and fighting amongst themselves. When you are in the minority, there is little you can do to make things happen. One of your major objectives is to keep the majority from making the things happen, since that is likely the opposite of what you want. This infighting amongst Republicans as a new Congress begins is the best thing the Democrats could wish for. They hope it means that Republicans will be unable to agree on much and will be unable to move legislation unless they get Democrats to support it. The Democrats are celebrating and doing backflips over this. I don’t blame them. I would too if the tables were reversed.

I only personally know and served with one of the 20 people who voted against McCarthy in the first 5 roll calls. But I have known many like them. They are purists. They know what they believe to be right and will not accept anything short of that. They are happy to lose everything, as long as they are true to their own beliefs while losing. They dislike anyone whose purity is less than theirs. I disagreed with them then and I disagree with them now.

I will paraphrase what I said to one of these purists who was staking an uncompromising position on some issue. To this person I said:

“I understand what you want. I want that too. If you and I were the joint kings of America, I would put in almost the identical policies that you support. But we are not kings. This government is a democracy. Those Democrats over there were elected just like you and I. They get a vote just like you and I. You think they are wrong and I do too. But they get a vote and they think we are wrong. If we can do something that gets us 70% of what we want and they will vote for it, we should take it and move the ball forward. If all we ever do is throw Hail Mary passes, we will get intercepted or an incompletion and rarely score anything.”

My appeal fell on deaf ears. I, clearly, was impure.

I have known Kevin McCarthy since 2000. He has his faults as we all do. But he has earned this job and should have the opportunity to show what he can do with it. It is hard to see anyone else more capable than he today of doing this job. You also need to have someone who wants the job. Jim Jordan does not want it. He would rather Chair an important committee. I felt the same way. I had no interest in the cat herding job of leadership. I wanted to make policy as a committee Chairman.

I will finish with a story. When I was in Congress and serving on the Financial Services Committee, there was a lot of discussion about the Export-Import (Ex-Im) Bank. That Bank fell under the subcommittee of which I was Chairman. The Ex-Im Bank exists to help US manufacturers compete against foreign manufacturers who receive subsidies form their governments. Like many government agencies, I thought it had a good purpose but was wasting a lot of money. I came up with a set of reforms that would have preserved the Bank but reduced its cost. I had a bunch of Democrats lined up to support it. That was important because Barrack Obama was president. If a bill did not have Democrat support, he was unlikely to sign it. So, I believed I had a compromise which saved money and could actually pass the House and Senate and be signed by the president.

The Chairman of the wider committee at the time disagreed. He said that my bill did not get everything we wanted. I explained that I understood that but that it moved the ball forward and did he notice that the sitting president would never sign anything close to what the Chairman wanted? He told me that someday soon, Republicans would have control of the House, the Senate and the White House and then we could pass what he wanted. I told him a story about birds in the hand or in the bush.

The story ends this way. In 2016, Republicans did get control of all three elected parts of the Federal government, just as he thought.  But, President Donald J. Trump loved the Ex-Im bank and wanted more money spent on it, which he passed through congress with largely Democrat votes.

The moral of the story is that purists rarely if ever get the purity they seek and more often than not get much less than they could otherwise achieve, or, in the case of said Committee Chairman above, get nothing.

I don’t know how this fight for Speaker will be resolved. I do know that the purists are hurting the very cause for which they care so much.

Politics is a team sport. If you want to make law in the House, you need 217 House Members, 60 Senators and a president to join you. You can stand out and lead and be an individual, but you can only be effective when you play with the team. If you are not a team player, go play golf or tennis. But…don’t serve in Congress.

I remain respectfully,
Congressman John Campbell
Drive Fast and Live Free