Comity: It's Ebbing. You Can See It Now. It's Been Happening For A While.

It's not a word often used in conversations but it is the world that keeps conversations from spinning out of control, if not disappearing altogether.

That word is comity: the attitude of mutual respect for the right of someone else to say what's on their minds, as long as the words aren't meant to be, themselves, disrespectful. It keeps debates and discussions on legislative issues going. It fosters ways to compromise by keeping people in the room. And it brings people back to the same place the next day, unafraid that they'll either get insulted and/or that they'll need to insult someone back in justifiable response.

It is the very thing that saved the United States of America in 1787. Indeed, it's not ridiculous to say that it created the country that survived until it couldn't, in 1861, when comity, which had been slowly ebbing in the houses of Congress, basically disappeared amongst those with sufficient senses of victimization to stop coming altogether. Then guns settled it with hundreds of thousands dying.

Not for the first time, but for the first time to such an extent, the absence of comity was on display last night during 45's State of the Union propaganda package of lies. Bitterness lined the room; 45 had beaten the impeachment rap and entered filled with vindictiveness and spite. In a break with precedent, Speaker Pelosi refrained from gushing in her introduction of 45 and simply said, "Members of Congress: the President of the United States." Responding, 45 refused her handshake.

That's a new low, but there's plenty of room to descend. We're getting there now: Tim Ryan and Seth Moulton, two former presidential candidates (and who were both good but just don't have the chops right now) walked out of the speech. Pouncing on an obvious gaffe, the Democrats signaled "H.R. 3" to the podium when 45 said he'd sign a bill passed to control prescription drugs, since that was the topic of that bill except Mitch McConnell hasn't moved it off his desk yet (and maybe it isn't a gaffe; maybe and typically, he wants something that has his previous approval so he can claim credit for it). And of course, there was Pelosi's tearing up of the speech in plain sight after 45 had finished.

What was missing was the Joe Wilson, "you lie" insult thrown at Obama. There may be time yet to do that if the country messes up like the Democrats have in Iowa and puts this horrible mistake back in the White House for four more years. There will be thousands of lies until then, and untold thousands if extended.

The deterioration of comity, then, seems to have taken place here and now. But no: It's been happening for quite some time.

Ira Shapiro wrote of the decline of comity in the Senate in his work The Last Great Senate (2012). Shapiro, who spent twelve years in senior staff positions in the Senate, believes he can tell when it really began: Upon the election of Ronald Reagan and the upsets of several prominent Senate Democrats in 1980. It was then that the attitudes began to change:

In seeking an explanation for the Senate's precipitous decline, the evidence points unequivocally n one direction. Certainly, many times the actions of Senate Democrats, individually or collectively, have frustrated or disappointed supporters like me. I can also recall many instances in which Senate Republicans acted as superb legislators and statesmen. Neither party has ever had a monopoly on fine legislators. But overall, today's fractured and ineffective Senate is the product of the continuous, relentless movement of the Republican Party further and further to the right, accompanied by a fierce determination to defeat their Democratic opponents and an increase willingness by some to frustrate and obstruct the legislative process and the operation of government by whatever means possible.

These attitudes are sent down through the decades. After he was upset in his 2004 re-election race (by John Thune, who's still there), Minority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota wrote Like No Other Time (2006), in which he expanded on what Shapiro began to see twenty years earlier:

There is an element of coercion and fear used by certain Republican leadership that just doesn't exist on our side....I recall what one Republican House member told me: "They rule by fear and intimidation, and punish those who disagree."
That is not the Democratic way. We've chosen to lead by consensus rather than hear, even if it's sometimes harder to build consensus than to issue a dictate....
Most of the Republican hard core and their followers don't (encourage and embrace diversity). When President Bush (43) says, "You're either with us or against us," he's not just speaking to the world; he's articulating an attitude that permits the Republicans' view of our own society, and, within their party's core leadership, of themselves.
The Republican Party's hierarchy doesn't often appear comfortable with diversity, not when it comes to people and certainly not when it comes to opinions. Within the inner circles of the Republicans' higher ranks certainly within the leadership that controls Congress and the White House at the moment (remember, this is nearly twenty years ago now), they simply don't tolerate it....
The current core Republican leadership, from George Bush on down, not only runs internal affairs of its party, but would like to run the affairs of our nation with a 'with us or against us' attitude. This attitude reflects not only a lack of respect for dissent, but the forceful imposition of one's ideas on another.

Articles about the lack of comity in the Senate are legion: Just google it. In an article called "The Empty Chamber" in the New Yorker in August, 2010, George Packer echoes Shapiro in designating the Reagan Revolution and its insurgence of anti-government conservatives as being the cutting edge of "the Senate's modern decline." But it isn't that alone. Utilization of arcane Senate rules to hold up court nominations and insisting on declared but silent filibusters and delaying of committee hearings and legislative mark-ups haven't helped people get along. A three-day work week, at best, along with having to endlessly return to home states to do fund-raising, wrote Packer, has also kept Senators from opportunities to get to know each other better.

Edgy already, to add

• the stonewalling of Merrick Garland's Supreme Court nomination; 
• the fiasco of Brett Kavanaugh's nomination hearings and the tokenism of the 'investigation' that followed; and
• 45's impeachment and the clear and unmistakeable abrogation of constitutional responsibilities, with excuses varying from marginal to absurd in panic-stricken efforts to avoid being called names by an awful, craven person--that "element of coercion and fear" mentioned by Daschle, now turned up white-hot; try Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown's op-ed in the New York Times 2/6/20--

won't add to the fellow-feeling and general levels of respect that one party has for another. And that isn't even mentioning the House, where people get greater latitude to call each other fairly nasty things to begin with.

The realization that one side has won a marginal, ethically vacant victory and must sit there and watch its so-called champion now unleash endless invectives on the people who in the name of justice tried to get rid of him will only deepen the divides already afflicting us. We enter this election season with distances only increased between us, and a president only too happy to widen them. If that cannot be successfully addressed in the U.S. Senate by what should be the finest political leadership we have, we are not in a good place and won't be for some time.

Get ready. This will not be fun.

Be well. Be careful. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark