FOOLS ON THE HILL

An up-close look at the "clown show" of right-wing extremists who continue to fail to govern in Congress.

Washington Post columnist Milbank, a veteran Capitol Hill observer and author of The Deconstructionists and O Is for Obama, resolved to limit his journalistic focus to the House of Representatives. His weekly essays from 2023 to early 2024 form the basis of this collection, enhanced by additional reporting, analysis, and context. The author presents the chaos, incompetence, and self-created crises in the House in three parts: Disinformation, Dysfunction, and Disunion. He explains how GOP gerrymandering created House seats from uncompetitive districts, enabling the "craziest SOBs" to hold the balance of power. Anyone following the past two years of national news will remember the lowlights: Kevin McCarthy's path to the Speakership over 15 ballots and capitulation to the "fringiest elements of the right wing"; the near-default on the federal debt, "playing chicken with the American economy”; threats of government shutdown; the only speaker ousted in U.S. history; and the resulting three-week “free-for-all” search for a new speaker. Election denier Mike Johnson has created his own record of failure and dysfunction, killing a bipartisan border deal and endangering U.S. aid to Ukraine and Israel. Much else from this dismal era of congressional misrule will be familiar to citizens who have been paying attention: national leaders legitimizing white nationalism and demonizing immigrants, or the obsessive impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden without "a shred of evidence." Milbank brings useful detail and nuance to his portrait of this broken political system. For example, we learn that Matt Gaetz left a draft of his "Motion to Vacate" the Speaker on a changing table in a Capitol restroom and that Marjorie Taylor Greene thought "indictable crimes" was pronounced "indicktable."

Clear revelations about how abuse of congressional power and political dysfunction have never been so egregious.