Adam Zyglis, Buffalo News
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A Glimmer Of Hope
Once again, we have averted disaster only hours after there appeared to be no prospect for victory. Lurching from crisis to crisis is no way to govern because—sooner or later—one of the crises will not be averted. But there is a valuable lesson in what happened on Saturday:
When push came to shove, nearly 60% of Republicans in the House voted in favor of sanity and order over insanity and chaos.
Even better, 80% of all members of the House voted in favor of sanity and order, while only 20% voted in favor of a senseless shutdown.
Reflect on those numbers: 80% vs. 20%. Those percentages map neatly onto a widely applicable pattern in life where most natural phenomena demonstrate breakpoints at the 80% vs 20% dividing line. We should not be shocked that 20% of the members of the House would vote in favor of a government shutdown. We should be comforted by the fact that 80% of all House members—and 60% of all Republicans—voted in favor of the rational path forward.
Until the moment of the successful vote on the continuing resolution on Saturday, the media devoted 80% of its attention to the 20% outliers in the House. The over-emphasis on a small minority of irrational Republicans distorted the reality of the situation in the House and unnecessarily heightened anxiety in a situation that was already anxiety producing enough.
Here’s my point: When it came time on Saturday for Republicans to declare whether they were part of the chaos caucus or the reality caucus, they chose the latter. When the masks finally dropped away, we learned that there is more ground for hope than most of us assumed. Getting to “Yes” on Saturday was an ugly process. But the fact that we got to “Yes” should give us hope that there remains a central core of rational legislators around which a functioning Congress can be built. It is a small glimmer of hope, but we should welcome any possibility of progress that comes our way.
[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]
