Why Does Speaker Election Bother GOP Voters? (Satire)

Another delicious bit of satire from Alexandra Petri in The Washington Post: 

Wow, this is embarrassing!

No, not the once-in-a-century mess around electing a speaker of the House! Not the fact that, on Tuesday, after three ballots, none of which succeeded in putting Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in charge, the House had to adjourn speakerlessly. Not the fact that, again, failing to elect a speaker on the first vote has not happened since 1923! Not the fact that, if anything, the votes were trending further from McCarthy rather than closer to him when the House adjourned, and not the fact that a fourth and fifth and sixth vote failed Wednesday!

None of that is embarrassing at all! What’s embarrassing is that you were expecting anything else.

Honestly, we are a little confused you are taking this so poorly. This is like electing a bunch of clowns to office and being disappointed when they put on a magnificent clown show for you. Here is precisely the clown show you ordered! You shouldn’t be ashamed. You should be applauding. It is like ordering a decorative salad made entirely from Legos and being mad that you can’t eat it. It is like voting for Lauren Boebert and then becoming upset that a legislature that contains her is not productively working for the American people.

I’m sorry, what did you think you were getting? Did you really say to yourself, when you voted for Matt Gaetz, “Here is a man who is going to build coalitions and pass sensible, bipartisan legislation that will improve our lives?” No! You said, “I’m voting for Gaetz!”

Do you realize that this party contains Marjorie Taylor Greene? Actually, in this particular speaker scenario, Greene is the middle-of-the-road institutionalist, a sentence that is as surprising to us as it is to you! When you are counting on Greene as one of the founding blocks of your coalition, the writing is on the wall.

We thought you were serious about just electing people to be squeaky wheels, and specifically squeaky wheels that keep setting off the House metal detector because they are armed with guns for no clear reason. We said to ourselves, “If they wanted to move legislative priorities through Congress in a functional way, they knew whom they ought to have voted for: not us! We came here to make pointless noise and pass nothing, and we are never going to be out of noise!”

Get pumped for the debt-ceiling debate, when we are excited to maybe cause the country to default, which will be very bad for the economy but will allow us to showcase the distinctive brand of shouting to no purpose for which you’ve come to rely on us! We are not here to make the government better. We are here to investigate every member of the Biden administration six times.

To those few of you who voted for a Republican in a swing district who made some wild claim about governing or enacting any piece of legislation, we say, “Whoops! Next time, look at the whole party you’re putting into power when you cast your vote! Because we have a QAnon caucus now!”

Our party is always yelling that Washington is a broken, dysfunctional mess. What is embarrassing is that you thought we meant we were going to govern to change that. What is embarrassing is that you thought we were going to govern at all.