Congress Premiers Its 'Summer Stock' Theatre

by Pa Rock

Fan of the Arts

The first production of this year's "summer stock" theatre program put on by the US House of Representatives got underway yesterday.  The effort, a romping comedy of manners written and directed by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was originally called the "House BiPartisan Probe on the January 6th Insurrection" but may now have to be renamed because the House minority leader, a peckish dilettante by the name of Kevin McCarthy, withdrew his entire acting troupe from the endeavor after Nancy Pelosi stated that two of them could not appear in her play.

But in reality all of the fanciful maneuverings by Nancy and Kevin are essential parts of the production, and the entertainment factor is almost as important as anything that the esteemed congressional committee might actually uncover.  Republicans spurned an opportunity early on to co-produce this play on an equal footing with Democrats.  That left control of the play with Pelosi who promptly announced that the effort would go on with or without the active involvement of the minority Republican Party.  She drafted a plan for a committee with thirteen members, eight appointed by her with five slots reserved for the Republicans - if they chose to appear in her summer stock production.

Then, to cement the new play as "bipartisan," whether McCarthy chose to let his people play in the play or not, Pelosi appointed a Republican, Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, to fill one of the eight seats, or roles, that she reserved for her own control.  The problem with that was, at least for McCarthy, that even though Cheney is a registered Republican, serving in Congress as a Republican, and the daughter of a recent Republican Vice President of the United States, Donald Trump hates her and therefore so do many GOP members of Congress - and McCarthy recently engineered Liz's removal from a GOP leadership position in Congress.

Another problem, at least from McCarthy's perspective, is that Liz Cheney is still very angry about the insurrection, and voted (for a second time) to impeach Donald Trump as a result of that armed takeover attempt on the Capitol.  Her view of January 6th does not fit the growing GOP attempt to paint the entire day as just a conflagration of happy tourists getting a little too boisterous.

Kevin McCarthy decided earlier this week to go ahead and appoint five GOP members to Nancy's Pelosi's summer theatre production.  He sent in the names of his performers to Director Pelosi, and she promptly rejected two - Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana and Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, both of whom held public positions that seemed to support the insurrection, and both of whom had voted to overturn the electoral college's results which put Joe Biden in the White House.

Control then briefly shifted to Minority Leader McCarthy who promptly withdrew all of his players (five middle-aged white men) from the effort - all except for Liz Cheney whom he did not appoint and does not support - and who would tell him to sit and pin on his fountain pen if he did try to remove her.  

So as of the closing of Act One, Director Pelosi is firmly in charge of her own production, and the annoying gnat, Kevin McCarthy, has artfully removed himself from the whole process and is threatening to stage his own play to examine the same insurrection, but from the point of view of jovial Capitol tourists.   And Congressmen Banks and Jordan could have starring roles in both productions - as brilliant inquisitors in the GOP production and as hostile witnesses in the Demarcation version.

End of Act One.

(There will now be a brief intermission to allow both troupes time to hit the Sunday news show circuit.)