Government for Me, by Me, and of Me

By Christian Schneider

Thursday, February 16, 2023

 

In 1903, a Wisconsin state legislator introduced a bill suspending one of nature’s immutable laws.

 

“The law of gravitation as discovered by one Isaac Newton is hereby repealed,” read the legislation. It further noted the new law would take effect “from and after the passage and publication of the woman suffrage act.”

 

In other words, pigs will fly before women get to vote.

 

Introduction of this bill was no doubt accompanied by chortling, knee-slapping, and mustache-twirling from the all-male legislature. But one would be mistaken to think the era of legislative grab-assery ended in the early 20th century.

 

Just weeks ago, Representative Bill Huizenga (R., Mich.), introduced a trolltastic bill he called the STOVE (“Stop Trying to Obsessively Vilify Energy”) Act, after a member of President Joe Biden’s administration suggested that the Consumer Product Safety Commission might be interested in banning gas stoves.

 

It is unclear whether Huizenga’s bill would have successfully prevented people from “obsessively vilifying energy,” but “Preventing the Government from Promulgating Rules Banning Gas Stoves” presents a suboptimal acronym.

 

“They burned their fingers on the stove,” Huizenga said, while likely breaking his hands high-fiving himself. “They said, ‘This isn’t going to fly right now, so we’ll put it on the back burner.’”

 

The administration distanced itself from the claim that gas stoves ought to be banned, even as gas-stove regulation was being bandied about. Sometimes governments and their opposition trolls deserve each other.

 

No one objects to politicians being silly on their own time — see Republican Nancy Mace’s recent roast of the GOP at the Washington Press Club in which she hilariously took aim at her buffoonish colleagues. But there is a cost to the public when politicians and activists use the channels of government to engage in high jinks and gimmickry meant only to benefit themselves.

 

Of course, the grandstanding politician is endemic to the American political system. There have been thick-headed senators and representatives blowing hot air as long as there has been a Congress. Typically, a Senate committee proceeding is an hours-long occasion for senators to swipe right on the sound of their own voice.

 

But we are now in an era of politics as entertainment. Our elected officials are using our tax dollars to promote themselves as though they were movie stars through government channels.

 

Take, for example, the recent vote for speaker of the House, protracted by the MAGA wing of the Republican Party so that politicians such as Matt Gaetz, fentanyl in human form, could mug for cameras for days on end.

 

This week, these same spotlight-hogging time-vampires held a House committee hearing to complain that Twitter had blocked their social-media accounts. Representatives Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, the only two people in America who have to throw back a couple of Red Bulls to calm themselves down, used valuable public time and resources basically to boost the number of followers seeking their wisdom. Greene was so eager to get to the bottom of things that she didn’t let the Twitter executive she was questioning speak.

 

The “entertainment” wing of the party (as former GOP speaker Paul Ryan called it) has taken the institution of Congress and simply made it a platform for their own drama. They consistently invent crises, which — surprise! — only they can fix, thereby demonstrating their usefulness to voters. It’s a reality show, and taxpayers are paying the production costs.

 

As Yuval Levin writes in his book A Time to Build, these new legislators “act like outsiders commenting on Congress, rather than like insiders participating in it.” Levin notes that the transformation of our institutions into self-promotion vehicles has damaging effects.

 

“When we don’t think of our institutions as formative but as performative — when the presidency and Congress are just stages for political performance art, when a university becomes a venue for vain virtue signaling, when journalism is indistinguishable from activism — they become harder to trust,” Levin writes. “They aren’t really asking for our confidence, just for our attention.”

 

This corrosion has been taking place all over our culture. Take Washington Post technology reporter Taylor Lorenz, who regularly engages in soap-opera-style antics to — in her own words — build her own “brand.” Whether this helps the institution of the Washington Post, or journalism, seems to be of secondary concern.

 

And of course Elon Musk, by forking over $44 billion for Twitter, made himself its star.

 

But the “central character” phenomenon is far more objectionable when the public is funding it. It’s not only elected officials who are taking advantage, but regular people looking to use the levers of government to promote themselves. At city-council meetings across the land, attention-seekers are looking for their viral moment. Remember the guy who showed up at one such meeting in Lincoln, Neb., to ask city officials to ban the term “boneless chicken wings”? (He suggested, instead, “Buffalo-style chicken tenders,” “wet tenders,” “saucy nuggs,” or “trash.”)

 

And the surfer bros who used to troll the Los Angeles City Council by proposing a public statue of the late actor Paul Walker, of The Fast and the Furious fame? They ended up with their own Netflix deal.

 

Legislative bodies aren’t the only ones being platformed by the publicity-starved. Last year the Onion, one of America’s most famous satirical website, filed a humorous amicus brief in a U.S. Supreme Court case that found an Ohio man in legal trouble because he started a Facebook page lampooning the local police. The Onion’s brief was hilarious and novel and perfectly demonstrated the argument it was trying to make — that satire is fundamental to free speech.

 

The Onion’s brief was then followed up by a copycat brief by the Babylon Bee, a right-wing satirical site that has more value as a champion of online free speech than as a source of original comedy. The Bee’s brief gave its attorneys the chance to rattle off a few of its knee-slappers like “Chuck Norris Comes Out of the Closet as Even More of a Man” and “Donut Sales Surge as Police Departments ReFunded.”

 

The Onion showed that in limited instances, humorous amicus briefs can be used to great effect. But it also invites one to imagine a future where attention-seekers simply append briefs to famous court cases to take advantage of the visibility and legal immortality those briefs afford.

 

And, of course, courts are commonly the chosen battlegrounds for self-serving publicity hounds. Every time an entirely bogus lawsuit attempts to convince the public that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, the judicial process is corroded a little bit more.

 

At the moment, among Republican politicians, Florida governor and likely presidential candidate Ron DeSantis displays perhaps the greatest skill at attracting the spotlight in service of his ambitions. Last year the buses-of-migrants-to-Martha’s-Vineyard escapade showed off these skills, and this week, the Florida legislature approved $10 million more to ship illegal immigrants (whether they’re in Florida or not) to cities run by Democrats. (Coming soon to Democratic legislatures: bills granting one free plane ticket to Florida to recently released pedophiles. The arms race is on!)

 

Worse, since taking office, DeSantis has pushed for bills to regulate the First Amendment rights of social-media companies, college professors, and reporters, knowing that these laws have little chance of withstanding judicial review — but also that they’re making the right people angry at him.

 

We have come to a point where a fair amount of taxpayers’ cash is being poured into transforming political mediocrities into celebrities. We’d get more for our buck if we put them in a shipping container and let it float out into space — assuming we can get the good ones to once again suspend the laws of gravity.