That’s a pretty depressing sentiment.
It’s a depressing sentiment, but I think it’s important to note.
Yeah.
One of the things we’ve done is, we tell heroic stories—you know, Winston Churchill, right, those kinds of things. But we don’t actually talk about how hard it is to actually do that. And I think the good thing about this is hopefully being able to reassess what true leadership is.
When you’re talking about how there are so few heroes, and so many people who just do not have convictions, I think it’s easy, then, for the public to get cynical about it. The committee seemed to be trying to combat the cynicism.
Yeah, I hope so. During the hearings, it was kind of like when we think of old-school politics working the way it should. I was conscious of that lesson, and I think the committee itself was conscious of it, and that’s why we wanted to make sure that what we did was bipartisan. Will it have that impact? I don’t know. One of the biggest things that concerns me is, I’m 44, and I don’t think we’ve seen politics kind of done the way we all long for, when it was more bipartisan, since, like, the early 2000s. So the people getting into politics now have never seen it any other way. That’s what frightens me.
Watching the chaos of the past couple of weeks—all the George Santos stuff, McCarthy struggling to get the caucus in order last week around his Speakership bid—does that reaffirm your decision to leave Congress? How’s it been watching all this play out from the outside?
I mean, there was not a second, since any of that has gone down, where I missed it. There has not been a moment where I wished I had been on the House floor. I know what it’s like to be on the floor during all those votes and how miserable it is. Look, it’s been 12 years in Congress. I served my country. I’m not ruling out ever going back. But it is so dysfunctional at the moment that, for my mental health and my family, I’m so glad I wasn’t there. To watch the legislative-terrorist caucus—you know, the Freedom club—basically hold the whole Congress hostage, and to know that the moderates had as much power, but they don’t have the courage to do the same. I know because I was one of them! We try to get along. We try to make things function. That’s why they passed, unanimously almost, these House rules, which are dangerous. That’s the frustrating part—watching people that have so much power unwilling to fight back against the terrorists.
How does that bode for the next two years?
Pretty bad. I’ve been, for 12 years, in a hundred meetings with so-called moderates where we’re like, “This time we’re going to be willing to go to the wall. This time…we’re gonna play their game.” And we never do it. I don’t think it’s ever going to happen in the next couple years. So I think it is going to be a majority held hostage by the crazies still. And I think the debt limit is what really frightens me, because I went through this in 2011, and we were relatively much more functional then.
