Not so long ago, a single shout of “you lie” during a presidential address to Congress was enough to visibly rattle the congenitally cool, collected Barack Obama. Over the president’s right shoulder that night in 2009, his vice president Joe Biden frowned, looked down and shook his head.
If it had happened at last week’s State of the Union, Joe Wilson’s isolated outburst would have been just one note in a loud chorus from the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene and a new generation that routinely pushes the traditional boundaries of civic decorum.
And Biden, the man making the address to Congress, would have known enough to expect it. In fact, the president came to the Capitol Tuesday fully prepared for this sort of pushback and ready to rumble, in this case over whether Republicans would cut Social Security and Medicare.
It was a scene straight out of the new, coarser normal in Washington, where too often the confrontation is the point.
If Greene’s shouts at Biden dominated much State of the Union coverage, she’s got lots of company in the provocateur caucus. One active member is Louisiana’s own Clay Higgins, who issued a doozy last week.
The Lafayette Republican inserted himself into the latest fight between Former President Donald Trump and his on-again, off-again ally Chris Christie, the onetime New Jersey governor who helped both Trump’s campaigns but now says he can’t beat Biden in 2024.
After apparently wracking his brain for a suitable criticism for daring to pierce the MAGA bubble, Higgins came up with this: “This Chris Christie guy is quite an ugly woman.”
His tweet went on: “Ms. Christie, America doesn’t like you. We change the channel when you’re on TV. You look like a man and you have an attitude.”
So for those following at home, Higgins accused Christie of being a woman who looks like a man, and an uppity one at that.
That’s an assessment that speaks volumes but only about the guy doing the assessing, and his ideas on women certainly deserve some further exploration down the road.
For now, let’s just say that if one wanted to measure how far we’ve fallen, Higgins’ feeds would be a good place to start.
His takeaway from Biden's State of the Union was pretty boilerplate, by today's low standards: "Raise taxes. Ban guns. Kill babies. Open borders. Grant amnesty. End Oil&Gas. Socialize healthcare. Grow government"
In his more fevered moments, Higgins has taken to social media to threaten to shoot armed protesters (but surely not the ones on his side, who are clearly just expressing their 2nd Amendment rights). A more recent low point was his mockery of the brutal attack against Paul Pelosi, the former House Speaker’s husband, in a tweet that was later deleted.
With Higgins, as with some of his cohorts in the new, narrow GOP House majority, this sort of behavior has carried over into the official realm. Last week, he used an oversight hearing to effectively threaten arrest for former Twitter employees testifying about how the company came to block tweets about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Perfectly routine behavior from a member of Congress, right?
Unfortunately, increasingly so.
It’s one thing to parry over the issues, in a way that turns our typically staid presidential addresses to Congress into something more like the boisterous visits to Parliament by British prime ministers. It’s another to blow up the very idea that there are lines in public discourse that those in office shouldn’t cross.
Higgins doesn’t get as much press as Greene does, but among Louisiana officials, he's led the way into this particular breach.
If he doesn’t understand that this should be a point of embarrassment rather than pride, then his constituents in the 3rd Congressional District should.