Steve Bailey's Blog : Bob Good is all about obstruction

The congressman from Virginia’s 5th District was among the final six Republican holdouts against awarding fellow Republican Kevin McCarthy the House of Representative’s speaker gavel. Bob Good’s only concession to the inevitable was to vote “present “on the 15th ballot.

In a Dec. 28 essay in the Richmond Times Dispatch, Rep. Good outlined his reasons for not supporting Kevin McCarthy. Among them was the new speaker’s unwillingness “to change how Congress operates to empower regular members.” Even after McCarthy made concessions that would do this, and other Republican rebels came over to the California Republican’s side, Good still refused to vote for him.

Good said he wanted “a strong leader who represents the conservative center of the Republican conference.” Kevin McCarthy is much closer to his party’s “conservative center” than Bob Good. The 5th District congressman is an extremist like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is on the left, who also will go against her party when she does not get her way.

Extremists do not make good legislators. Legislators negotiate and compromise. It is how the House gets things done. Since extremists do not negotiate or compromise, they serve only as obstructionists. Good has voted against anything the Democrats offer because he believes the party is “evil.”

Among other things, he voted against the Disaster Assistance for Rural Communities Act, a bill that would make it easier for rural communities to get Small Business Administration relief following a disaster.

The Republican members of Congress from the two neighboring districts, Ben Cline and Morgan Griffith, saw the bill’s value for their people and voted for it, as did Kevin McCarthy. Since the 5th District is about 70% rural, Good’s vote was clearly against the interests of his constituents. So, in this case, what the congressman calls the “swamp cartel” was more supportive of his people than he was.

Good labels himself a “biblical conservative.” Perhaps he skipped 1 Samuel 15:23, which says, “For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry.”

Steve Bailey, Richmond

BOOK REVIEW

History has not paid much attention to first ladies and Jefferson Davis’ wife, Varina, less than most. The Civil War itself took up most of that space. Still, the woman's story in Charles Frazier’s book Varina is of a woman who married a man much older than herself and did not share in his political philosophy. This mother lost all but one of her children before they had grown up and lived out her life with the legacy of the failed Confederacy that she neither sought nor wholly accepted. This is a framed story, that is, a story within a story. Varina Davis, the only first lady of the Confederacy, tells her life story in a disconnected fashion to a young black man, James Blake, who begins visiting the eighty-year-old widow in a sanitorium where she is trying to recover from drug addiction. Blake wants to understand his own identity as Jimmie Limber, the black child whom Mrs. Davis rescued from a savage beating on a city street in Richmond, Virginia, and took in to be raised among her children. In response to Blake’s questions, Varina starts her story with her escape from Richmond, as this capital of the Confederacy fell to Union troops in the final stages of the American Civil War. She and her husband travel separately from each other physically and in the goals they have in mind for their respective journeys. She wants to escape and not return. Jefferson Davis, on the other hand, delusional that the confederacy had not been thoroughly defeated, wanted to head west toward Texas, where there was a small pocket of resistance, and keep up the fight, a fight that had already cost the American people over 600,000 lives. A climax to this part of the story is reached when Jefferson Davis reunites with his wife in Georgia and, in doing so, brings on the wrath of the Federal troops who were pursuing him. He is arrested, and during this period, Jimmie Limber is separated from the Davises. Varina, whom Frazier refers to as V throughout the book, was convinced that had her husband left her alone, she would have made it to Cuba. Varina Howell was a young woman with no dowry when she met Jefferson Davis at a party in 1843. She was seventeen, and he was thirty-five. For her, it was not about love as much as her need for security. She was more interested in his property and material wealth than his political career or ideology. And yet she stood by him throughout his ill-fated venture as the one and only president of the Confederate States of America and campaigned to have her husband freed from incarceration in Fort Monroe, Virginia, Charles Frazier’s debut novel Cold Mountain, about the journey home of a Confederate deserter in the closing days of the war, came out in 1997 and was a runaway bestseller. It was made into a movie starring Jude Law and Nicole Kidman. He uses a lyrical style, his descriptions are deep, and he puts a lot of meaning in a few words. Varina is Fraizer’s only other book with a Civil War setting. A phraseological slip-up appears when one character uses the expression “no worries,” an Australian phrase that was not part of the parlance of the nineteenth-century American language. Nevertheless, this is an engaging story about a woman few people know much about, probably because she was an outlier in the Civil War drama.

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Bob Good is all about obstruction

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