Tea at Trianon: Strangest Caucus in Washington: Massie and the House Democrats

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, May 18, 2026

Strangest Caucus in Washington: Massie and the House Democrats

From Amuse on X:

Consider the way the legislative machinery actually works. The Speaker has a narrow majority. He needs a rule from the Rules Committee to bring a bill to the floor under structured terms. If the right flank denies him that rule, he has two remaining options. He can pull the bill, which is failure, or he can go to the minority party for the votes he lacks, which is concession. There is no third door labeled “purer Republican bill.” That door does not exist. It has never existed. The math of a four-seat majority does not produce it, and no amount of principled posturing on cable television conjures it into being. Once the rule fails on a party-line basis, the negotiation is no longer between conservative Republicans and moderate Republicans. It is between the Speaker and Hakeem Jeffries. And Jeffries, being a competent minority leader, charges a price.
This is the Massie Doctrine in practice, and it is worth walking through the receipts.
Begin with the foreign aid package of April 2024. Speaker Mike Johnson brought forward a $95 billion bill containing aid for Ukraine, Israel, and the Indo-Pacific. The Rules Committee at the time had a nine-member Republican majority. Three of those Republicans, Thomas Massie, Chip Roy, and Ralph Norman, voted no on the rule. With only six Republican yes votes on Rules, the rule could not pass on a Republican basis. The four Democrats on the committee then crossed over and supplied the votes to advance it, 9 to 3. On the floor itself, the rule passed 316 to 94, with 165 Democrats voting yes and only 151 Republicans. That is not a Republican rule. That is a Democratic rule passed under a Republican Speaker, and it set a modern precedent for majority dysfunction.
Now ask the question a Massie or Roy defender must answer. What did Democrats charge for that rescue? They charged $9.1 billion in Palestinian humanitarian aid attached to the Israel bill, a provision many House conservatives found indefensible. They charged the elimination of any border security pairing, which Johnson had previously promised the Freedom Caucus would be attached to Ukraine funding. They defeated Massie’s own amendment to bar Ukraine funds from buying cluster munitions on a 10 to 2 vote in Rules. Rep. Grace Meng said the quiet part out loud, observing that Hakeem Jeffries was, in effect, functioning as the real Speaker because Republicans could not get their own bills out of a committee they nominally controlled. That admission did not come from a Heritage Foundation memo. It came from a sitting Democratic congresswoman taking a victory lap, and she was not wrong about who was driving. (Read more.)