While those who follow politics closely are busy parsing what the ouster of Kevin McCarthy as House speaker might mean for Congress, those who don’t – meaning the bulk of the American people – could be forgiven for tuning much of the drama of the last few weeks out. Ordinary Americans have little faith in Congress as it stands: as substantively or strategically consequential as they might be, the battles between members of our most reviled class, politicians, seem to most like juvenile squabbles.
Here’s a detail that might incense them further. For generations, members of the US Senate have carved and scrawled their names into their desks. This rite, the stuff of summer camp and grade school, is, to the peculiar mind of a US senator, something more profound – yet another tradition, as though they needed another, signifying their membership in an august and noble fraternity.
