12.18.25

This just in

It should not be a story worth reporting when four representatives from one party join the representatives from the other party to try to prevent a disaster about to befall their constituents.

But these days it is. Yesterday in my mailbox, from the New York Times, under the urgent heading “BREAKING,” came the news that Representatives Brian Fitzpatrick, Rob Bresnahan Jr., and Ryan Mackenzie, all of Pennsylvania, and Mike Lawler of New York had signed onto the Democrats’ petition to force a vote on a three-year extension of the Obamacare healthcare premium tax credits lapsing on Dec. 31. Without the credits, 22 million Americans will see a spike in their premiums so steep that many will no longer be able to afford to go to the doctor.

The subsidies will have expired by the time the vote happens in early 2026, if it happens, and it’s predicted that the Senate will reject the extension.

The Times called the move by the four Congress members, all from swing districts, “a striking rebellion against Speaker Mike Johnson,” who not long ago faced another such rebellion, when all but one of his conference voted to release the Epstein files.

The Times reporter characterized the four prodigal reps as “politically vulnerable.”

In fact, what struck me was not the rebellion itself but how small it was — that there are only four Republicans in districts politically diverse and therefore electorally unpredictable enough to require winning votes by serving the interests of voters.

This sort of ordinary process had already all but disappeared when SCOTUS dealt the final blow by okaying radical, racially discriminatory gerrymandering. For the foreseeable future, candidates will be able to pick their voters rather than the other way around.

Furthermore, partisanship is so unbreakable that when a politician takes the needs and desires of the people back home more seriously than the whims of the president and the reputation of the speaker; when a representative aligns his self-interest (keeping the job) with the interests of his constituents — and not the president or the speaker — it looks like treason.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, hardly a paragon of bipartisanship, also has distinguished herself by remembering the troubles of the folks in her district and rebuking her party for doing nothing to assuage them.

Politics are political — that is, people in public office make deals and cast votes with the aim of keeping themselves in office. But representative democracy is also about listening to constituents, hearing their needs and desires, and supporting policies that might better their lives: that is, representation. The principle behind electoral democracy is that representatives who sufficiently represent the voters get voted back in, and those who don’t do not.

Forgive me for the Civics 101 lesson. But when ordinary politics become extraordinary, attention must be paid. Because that’s when you know the democratic norms are in deep shit.