The Politics We Don’t Expect

I despise news reports that mention how a particular vote was “almost exclusively along party lines,” but then fail to list the exceptions.

Take, for instance, the over-reported “Joe Wilson slap-on-the-wrist” story. I had to dig through multiple reports like this one, before I finally found this one (and to be fair, this one and this one) listing the exceptions, i.e., the members of the House who did not vote the party line on the “resolution of disapproval” for Rep. Wilson’s outburst last week. (Normally, I would turn to THOMAS for this type of detail, but I was particularly uninventive this morning and couldn’t decipher the search string needed to pull up the desired info.)

Among the eventually discovered non-party-line voters was the super-liberal, former Democratic candidate for President, Dennis Kucinich:

Kucinich said that Wilson’s outburst was inappropriate but that sanctioning him after Obama accepted his apology only aggravated partisan polarization. Time spent debating sanctions against Wilson would have been better spent discussing ways to provide affordable health care to all Americans, said Kucinich.

“He apologized publicly to the president,” Kucinich said. “The president accepted his apology. That should have been the end of it.”

On the other side of the aisle, we find Republican Rep. Jo Ann Emerson, who explained that:

… she often disagrees with colleagues, “but I do not yell and shout across the aisle when someone else is speaking in the Congress and it is part of our responsibility to conduct our sessions with dignity and respect for one another and for guests.

“No matter which party invites the president to a joint session of Congress, he should be treated with the measure of respect due to any American who holds the office, regardless of the circumstances,” she added.

The linked report on Emerson also notes that she is “co-chair of the Center Aisle Caucus, a bipartisan group of members dedicated to promoting civility and consensus in the House.” In that respect, at least, she mirrors the attitude of her late husband; ref. the end of this post.

I don’t know about you, but I find the exceptions far more interesting than the expected. Then again, I’m old school. I was always taught it’s the exceptional that makes something “news.”

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Addendum: Digging a little deeper in the Politico report I linked above — as an example of a report that did not list the exceptions — I discovered, toward the end, that it did in fact spotlight a notable exception:

… while this was mostly a partisan affair, the resolution revealed a deep split between Wilson and his South Carolina colleague, [Republican] Rep. Bob Inglis, who voted in favor of the resolution.

“Part 1: Joe Wilson apologized to President. Part 2: He should apologize to House for rule violation. That would end the matter,” Inglis wrote on his Twitter account earlier in the day. “Joe Wilson analogy: I speed, lose control of my car and hit your car. Part 1: I fix your car. Part 2: I pay my speeding ticket. Case closed.”

My apologies for missing that on the first go-around, though I’m confident readers won’t struggle to find other examples of reports that omitted discussion of any of the exceptions, beyond a passing mention of their presence in the final vote.