At 80, Virginia Foxx acts childish in Congress. Does the GOP have any grown-ups? | Opinion
Virginia Foxx wants you to shut your mouth — and your brain — unless it meets the narrow-minded standard she and other House Republicans gleefully demonstrated this week before settling on an anti-democratic House speaker who would ban abortion and same-sex marriage outright if given the chance.
Foxx, who represents North Carolina in Congress, wants you to be as ignorant and as unconcerned about the health of this democracy as she is. An outburst by Foxx this week continued an ugly streak of high-profile legislators from the Carolinas caught on camera proudly saying stupid or immoral things.
Tim Scott, the junior senator from South Carolina, took to the Republican primary debate stage and bizarrely suggested that Black people had it harder under Great Society programs than slavery. Lindsey Graham, the senior senator from South Carolina, took to Fox News and called for the wiping out of an entire people, a population of more than two million, half of whom are children.
I guess Foxx, who represents the 5th District of North Carolina, didn’t want to be left out, wanted to prove she could look and sound as idiotic as the gentleman south of the Tar Heel border.
“Mr. Johnson, you helped lead the effort to overturn the 2020 election results,” ABC News’s Rachel Scott began asking Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana at a press conference during the GOP’s seemingly never-ending debate about who would become the next Speaker of the House. Johnson was elected speaker on Wednesday.
“Do you stand by…” Scott continued but was interrupted by an outburst of childish boos from people that voters inexplicably sent to Washington to guide the most-prosperous nation on Earth.
“No! Shut up!” Foxx shouted. “Shut up!”
Foxx has lived for nearly eight decades but she behaved like an 8-year-old on the national stage.
We are not sending our best to represent our interests, or to even uphold our democracy. Instead, we are repeatedly electing people like Scott and Graham and Foxx.
While Sen. Scott decided to demean the historical reality of Black people to garner votes for a mostly white-conservative audience and Graham showed no regard for fellow human beings, Foxx scoffed at a central question that goes to the heart of this thing we call a representative democracy.
What would it mean if the next speaker is among those who went out of his way to foster doubt about the 2020 election, the kind of doubt that fueled the hatred and violence we saw on Jan. 6, 2021? Why is one of our major political parties beholden to election deniers, particularly at a tinderbox moment such as this? We are about to find out, given that House Republicans chose Johnson to lead them, and the election denier in chief, Donald Trump, remains the odds-on favorite to capture the Republican presidential nomination for 2024.
If Foxx had any political integrity, or integrity of any kind, she would not have shouted “Shut up!” She would have answered the question. She would have ensured the American public that she would support no one for House speaker, or any other position, if they did not support basic democratic norms, such as respecting the nonviolent transfer of power even when your preferred candidate loses. Instead, she joined in with fellow Republicans hissing, booing and unleashing childlike taunts.
But that’s not really surprising. Her party has been busy trying to craft a political map in North Carolina that would all but guarantee Republicans would retain a stranglehold on power in the state even if they can’t convince a majority of us to vote for them.
They treat this precious place like a game, something to toy around with. But there’s nothing funny about what’s happening. We need grownups at the wheel during a time like this. And yet we repeatedly choose overgrown children to lead us.
We need to do better. We must. Our country needs us. We can’t keep failing it.
This story was originally published October 26, 2023 at 11:58 AM.