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April 29, 2020

The House of Representatives has identified itself as a non-essential service

By Andrea Widburg

The original plan in Washington, D.C., was for both the Senate and the House to reconvene on May 4.  News broke on Tuesday, though, that the House will not be returning to work.  It turns out that so many members of the House panicked at the thought of working once more for the American people that House majority leader Steny Hoyer was forced to announce that the House would remain closed next week (emphasis added):

We made a judgment that we will not come back next week but that we hope to come back very soon," Hoyer told reporters on a press call.

Hoyer said he and Pelosi made the decision to halt plans to return after consulting Monday evening with the Capitol's attending physician, who warned that lawmakers could be at risk given the still-rising number of coronavirus cases in the Washington, D.C. area. Nearly 4,000 people have tested positive in D.C., as of Monday, plus thousands more in the Maryland and Virginia suburbs.

"We had no choice. If the Capitol physician recommends that we not come back, then we have to take that guidance," Pelosi told reporters on a separate call Tuesday afternoon.

Pelosi's statement that "we had no choice" is a load of bull manure.  All over America, people have been making choices to keep the country functional: health care workers, truckers, factory workers, store clerks, sanitation workers, and many more.  The list is endless.

Writing at Disrn, Adam Ford took a moving, really very important, look at the choices American people make:

First, we reported on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The darling of the "just left of Marx" camp, in an interview with Vice, stated that once the economic lockdowns are lifted, Americans should simply refuse to go back to work.

[snip]

Next, we reported on factory workers at a company called Braskem America in Pennsylvania. More than 40 employees made the collective decision in March to leave their families and live at the factory for 28 days, where they would eat, sleep, and take turns working 12-hour shifts to produce protective equipment for healthcare workers fighting the coronavirus pandemic. They clocked out yesterday after their month-long shift.

When it comes to the House of Representatives, the Capitol physician didn't — indeed, he couldn't — bar the door.  He's just an excuse.  What really happened is that a noisy or sizable percentage of our 435 representatives were too afraid to go to work and decided that their responsibilities to the American people are so limited, even meaningless, that no one would care about their absence.  In essence, as Pradheep J. Shanker tweeted, House members just declared that they are non-essential workers:

Members of the House are paid $174,000 per year.  (Pelosi is paid $223,500, which is nothing compared to her $160-million net worth.)  If they're not working, we should not be paying them.  The taxpayers shell out almost $76.7 million annually to pay House members.  Given that House members work an average of only 160 days per year, that's around $48,000 per day.  If they're sitting at home for thirty days, we Americans are entitled to a $1.4-million refund.

While you're thinking about paying the House all that money, keep in mind that the only thing the House accomplished in 2020 was a faked up impeachment that managed to distract too much of the nation's attention from the rising threat in the streets of Wuhan, China.  When it came to helping the American worker, their first instinct was to help that Democrat party.  They had to be shamed into helping ordinary Americans.  If that's not the definition of non-essential, I don't know what is.

Meanwhile, in the Senate, Cocaine Mitch McConnell is made of sterner stuff.  He's insisting that the Senate return to work on May 4:

McConnell announced on Monday that the Senate would return to session on May 4 for its first full week of legislative business after the CARES Act passed in late March. And he has not been shy about his desire to start confirming judges as soon as his chamber is back in session. 

"I haven't seen anything that would discourage me from doing that. And as soon as we get back in session, we'll start confirming judges again," he told Hugh Hewitt in a recent interview. 

The fact that McConnell believes that the Senate ought to do the job that citizens pay it to do has enraged Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), whose tweet bleeds unseemly fear as well as partisan fury:

What's become clear throughout the Wuhan virus panic is that Democrats have an overwhelming fear of death and a pathological lust for power.  All other Americans, the normal people, have an overwhelming fear of societal collapse.  Come November, Americans would do well to remember those distinctions.

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