This morning I thought I might write about the oil stain on my garage floor. Or, perhaps, the blue fuzzy lint I cleaned out of my navel this morning. But I was just a little too lazy to write on a topic of such irrelevance.
Besides, Alicia Mundy beat me to it this morning. In her Letter from Washington column in the Seattle Times, Alicia writes about Rep. Dave Reichert (R-WA-8)…and his utter irrelevance:
The annual power rankings from Congress.org have dropped Reichert, now a sophomore Republican, from 168th among 439 members to 419th. That puts him lower than emissaries from the District of Columbia (100), Guam (177) and Puerto Rico (377), none of whom represent a state or have actual voting rights in the House.
Reichert ranks lower than most Republicans, and every Democrat except Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA-2), who has been marginalized ever since the FBI filmed him taking bribes.
In short, Reichert has no recent accomplishments (well…he did successfully pretend to get a school bus driver fired). Furthermore he has shown no capacity to adapt—to find some kind of functional niche—in a House controlled by Democrats.
“But…but…but, what do you expect, Reichert is only a sophomore!” Sophomore, indeed…but, Reichert ranks 38th out of the 41 Representatives in his class of 2004.
So I guess Ms. Mundy was having one of those “I think I’ll write about something completely irrelevant” days, and she reported irrelevant old news about Washington’s 8th Congressional District’s irrelevant Representative.
If Ms. Mundy had been in the mood for a little more relevancy, she might have written about, say, sophomore Rep. McMorris Rogers (R-WA-5), with a ranking of 231 of 439, or 12th of 41 in the class of 2004 (and she spent the session pregnant until giving birth last month and missed much of May as a consequence).
Ms. Mundy could have done that…but, then again, McMorris Rogers doesn’t have that head of rich, silvery hair, bulging biceps, and those washboard abs….