The Hammer

Speaker of the House sounds like a great job on paper, I grant you. There are awesome perks like a sweet-ass gavel, not having to indulge in a knife fight for the least shitty office spaces with other congresspeople and all that free TV time trying not to fall asleep while photobombing every single State of the Union speech.

Both the role and the power of the office as a prize fluctuate depending on whether or not the speaker's party matches the president's. If they match, you get to preside over a period of furious lawmaking and agenda-setting, working in frantic concert with the executive branch in the two years before the next cycle of elections sees either you or the president thrown out of office by a fickle electorate completely allergic to the idea of functioning, constructive, cooperative government. None of us really pays any attention in civics classes, not because they're usually offered in 12th grade when the American human brain reaches peak ennui, but because the idea of "separation of powers" is something we innately get. Not only get, insist on. Carefully delineated roles laid out in separate articles of the Constitution to guarantee "checks and balances," fine. But what if we had that with just a leeeetle bit of "Real Housewives of Atlanta" thrown in? That's way better TV. And internet. And Thanksgiving Day hate-speech amongst family.

It takes all kinds, too. We’ve had simple one and a Bond villain one and, what hey!, even a lady one once. Wait, lemme re-check... aaaand... yep, just the once.

There are drawbacks, though. The main one is: you have to be Speaker of the House. Like the whole time, that's your whole job. You have to corral a bunch of people, all of whom have been tragically encouraged in the exact same farcical megalomania and who are prone if not required by both the very nature of their jobs and the prequalifying narcissism that got them there to be a contrarian pain in the ass. There are 435 congressional districts, all with very different if not diametrically opposed needs. Now in my job (which I not only volunteered by had to fucking campaign for) I have to try to convince them that this bill to cap emissions from coal-burning power plants is something they want? That's a lot of handjobs. Which in congressional terms, often looks like DoD contracts for shipbuilding facilities.

Also, since it's elective, you have to keep in the good graces of these people if you want to maintain your position. That means if the fucking lunatics break out, kill the orderlies and seize the asylum like a pirate ship, you have to be the first one to fashion an eyepatch out of a single-serving applesauce lid and start screaming at your naked shoulder as though there were a parrot there.

Like poor John Boehner now, the SotH with ALL the feelings, has got to roll his ass out there in front of camera, in public, and say he thinks it's a good idea for Congress to sue the president because O'Bummer is, like, so totes out of control with executive orders and we (and this is a real quote) "didn’t elect a monarch or king."

I try to give John Boehner the benefit of the doubt. I know his job is hard. And maybe he's fighting so hard to keep it, compromising his personal integrity or even his ability to simulate human reason in front of other humans, because he knows if he goes, what replaces him is going to be some kind of Tea Party Blackbeard to whom governance is anathema and just got into this whole "public service" thing for the maximal pyrotechnical potentialities. I have to think that. Otherwise the person third in line of succession to the presidency actually believes it's a good idea to attack a whole separate branch of government based on ideas that are disprovable with one visit to snopes.com.