Hunter S. Thompson once described the music business as:
“… a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.”
Clearly, Thompson had seen too much of the industry he once coveted. He recognized as some point that it wasn’t the elite, esteemed community to which he had once aspired membership.
It was just a herd of jackasses standing in one place.
These days, both his description and the reality it reflects can be neatly affixed to the United States Congress.
Now maybe this isn’t a revelation. Congress is, after all, a reflection of the country at large. Even if its demography, its number of millionaires, and its innumerable links with corporate boardrooms suggests otherwise, Congress reflects us. We elect its membership. And therefore, we should expect it will have its share of jackasses, just as we have in every municipality across our great nation.
As sure as we will each die and as sure as will pay taxes which will in-turn be used to do very little to improve our day-to-day lives … we will never run short of jackasses. They are all around us. The more we live and age, and the more jaded we become, the more we mistakenly convince ourselves that the number of jackasses per capita is on the rise.
In reality, they have always been there. We just notice them more as our eyes become trained to exceptional levels of stupidity.
Or maybe I have just been deliberately blinkered enough to convince myself things aren’t getting worse when, in fact, they are spiralling fiercely toward oblivion.
That’s the feeling I get when I cast a reluctant gaze upon the herd of jackasses currently inhabiting the House and Senate. It is unmistakable at this stage that the jackass-to-non-jackass ratio has been climbing steadily for a few decades, and long ago inverted itself.
This is not to say jackassery in politics is new. We've had jackass presidents, jackass judges, jackass secretaries filling entire jackass cabinets. These people have made horrific decisions on our behalf, involving us in jackass wars thousands of miles away, turning all of us into jackasses as we unwittingly carry out dumb ideas under the false impression of virtue.
They’ve gotten us into debt, ignored major issues impacting us, and turned us against one another with their obstructive and intemperate idiocy, instigating a deafening national bray loud enough to conceal any attempt at real communication.
But a special place in the jackass Pantheon must be preserved for Congress. This is the most sacred instrument of domestic power in our system of government … the one which guarantees us representation.
Whatever happened before and however we got here, we are now represented not by a coherent and serious branch of government, but by a pack of asses standing in one place. Our nation is stalled and being actively strafed by a multitude of issues because of a herd of overpaid, overstuffed, overestimated, obstructive, stubborn, braying jackasses.
One particular jackass stands out at this moment, and it’s Tommy Tuberville from Alabama.
For nine months, Tuberville has ritualistically abused his power to block the nominations of 273 military officer appointments to senior roles. He’s doing this because he’s unhappy with the Department of Defense supporting female servicemembers stationed in Alabama to travel outside the state if they wish to seek abortions. The state is one of 25 which outlawed abortion after the Supreme Court’s ruling earlier this year.
The impact of his obstruction to the military services is significant. Succession plans are intricate, time-dependent domino sequences that, when disrupted, leave organizations adrift, administration piling up, and decisions languishing. If you’ve been hearing that this doesn’t impact readiness, your news is coming from an uninformed source. The distraction caused by the dominos not falling as planned is massive, and a lot of important activity is delayed.
Tuberville’s jackassery has ignited a debate, just as it is intended to do. Overlapping factions beat one another with various cudgels, with the debate becoming the focus while military readiness subtly withers in the background.
One faction says we shouldn’t care. Generals? Who needs ‘em. They’re overpaid, over-privileged. If they need to wait, it doesn’t matter. Their egos could use a bit of ruffling.
Another faction says this a good thing because it proves we don’t need so many generals in the first place. Let’s use this moment to go after the overstaffing.
Then we have the various arguments driven by abortion politics, use of taxpayer money to swerve the reach of state law, and so on.
Here’s the thing about all of these arguments: whatever their merits, we shouldn’t even reach them. If these are colourable controversies, they should be addressed by Congress debating them, bringing bills to the floor, and pursuing solutions.
This isn’t about any of that. It’s about Tuberville abusing his power. If he doesn’t think a nominee is worthy of a position he should say so and block a nomination on the merits, and that’s how the process should conclude. Withholding his vote to end-run legislative process and try to force changes to unrelated laws by leveraging national defense is a profound abuse of his power.
It’s also deeply dishonest.
On his own website, Tuberville says:
“Our world is growing more dangerous with adversaries around the globe testing our resolve.”
Well … if that’s true, then you’re helping our adversaries by distracting our defense leadership and degrading service readiness by starving organizations of smooth transitions and focused leaders. So you obviously don’t believe what you say about the risk to our defense, and we should have a debate about defense funding. Or you do believe it, which makes your hostage-taking reckless.
Either way, when you say something and then act in direct contravention of that thing, you’re just being a jackass.
This is not me suggesting Senators like Tuberville shouldn’t exercise leverage, nor attempting to wish away their use of theatricality. These things are part of politics. Making a point to a broader audience is part of building consensus. Since the early days of any representative system, parliamentary tactics have been used to create platforms to call attention to divisive issues. That’s all well and good.
But this practice needs to be time-limited. Make your point, wring out your stall tactic until you’ve done what you can with it, and then move on. If you choose not to affirm after a set period (which I think most Americans would want expressed in days rather than weeks or months), you are bypassed and the nomination proceeds without you.
This is the legal adjustment Congress should be mobilizing to make right now. Instead, it’s just a herd of jackasses ambivalently watching one jackass do his thing. Seems normal to them. Or perhaps they’ve concluded it’s in their interest somehow, which would be jackassery on par with the jackassery giving rise to it.
The particularly unforgivable aspect of Tuberville’s tantrum is that by kicking this issue into the tall weeds of abortion politics, he is guaranteeing it will be terminally obstructionist. The issue is intractable. The more we talk about it, the more divided we get, so this episode will solve nothing.
If Tuberville wants to actually achieve something, he should mobilize his fellow legislators to actually pass laws on the subject, the absence of which led to the Supreme Court creating the interstate division now fuelling this debacle.
When you are elected to govern but you choose to obstruct instead, you’re just being a jackass. Over the course of the past thirty years, legislative jackassery of this sort has led to presidents filling various legal voids with their own actions, orders, and interpretations of law.
I predict that will happen in this case as well. At some point, the Biden Administration will feel there is a security risk created by the delays, and will issue an executive order appointing officers to positions. This will ignite legal challenges which may well fall in favour of executive action to fill the void create by congressional shirking. This pattern has replayed incessantly in the modern era, and helps explain why we have an executive branch so over-powerful that it should scare the bejesus out of us all.
For Americans not yet zombified by the plague of jackassery raging across the land, there is a larger point here; one person, based on his individual opinion, is holding our entire national defense establishment hostage. This is alarming. It is not a recipe for a strong defense. It exposes that we are at grave risk. Any jackass with a political axe to grind can simply pin the services down indefinitely.
This gives our enemies a nice blueprint. If they can use troll farms and disinformation to continue stoking internal political division, and as a bonus embroil our defense establishment in it, they can defeat us militarily without firing a shot.
Congratulations to the Senator from Alabama. You worked hard your whole life, and you made it. You’re now a notorious jackass.
Tony Carr is a retired Air Force officer, experienced operational leader, and writer. The views expressed here are his own.