The following article by David Hawkings was posted on the Roll Call website July 24, 2017:
Lawmakers feel free to misbehave when their leaders drop ‘regular order’
A president whose brand is all about flouting basic political manners is getting matched in misbehavior more and more by fellow Republicans in Congress.
The first six months under President Donald Trump have been marked not only by a further coarsening of GOP rhetoric, stoked mainly by incessant infighting in backrooms, but also by increasing defiance of decades of behavioral norms — from Trump’s nominal friends and skeptics alike, when they’ve been trying to work with him and when they’ve been scrambling to maneuver despite him.
The declining standards of congressional comportment are remarkable, but, in a sense, have been easy to anticipate:
When the formalities of procedural and political regular order get abandoned at the Capitol, a world of informal and sometimes even infantile irregularity will quickly start shaping how lawmakers approach the legislative process, their political calculations, and their dealings with one another. Continue reading “How Bad Political Manners Fomented the Health Care Mess”