I have lived long enough to see 22 Republican members of the House of Representatives vote against a measure to prevent the country's withdrawal from NATO. That's a pretty long time, now that I think about it. From Reuters:

The Democratic-led House approved the measure by a bipartisan 357-22 vote, with the only “no” votes coming from Republicans. It now goes to the Republican-majority Senate, where its future is unclear, although a similar measure has been introduced there. At a news conference before the vote, Democratic lawmakers said they were alarmed by reports of the Republican president’s low regard for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a 70-year-old military alliance that joins the United States and Canada with allies in Europe. The New York Times said last week that several times over the course of 2018, Trump privately told his advisers he wanted to withdraw from NATO.

“It is in a sense crazy that we have to be doing this,” added freshman Democratic Representative Tom Malinowski, a former assistant secretary at the State Department. “I take the President of the United States seriously. He has made no secret of his disdain for the NATO alliance and his willingness to consider leaving it ... Congress is now the only check we have,” Malinowski said.

You can make a solid argument that a lot about NATO needs a serious upgrade. You also can make a solid argument that expanding its membership to include former Warsaw Pact nations, and the new countries carved out of the old Yugoslavia, provided an additional array of new and dangerous tripwires in places that have nothing to do with the North Atlantic. But this has to do with placating El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago, who's done everything except dance the kazahtski on the Truman Balcony.

Ron Sachs Getty Images

Among the 22 Nay votes were Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan, charter members of the House Freedom Caucus; Louie Gohmert, Padishah Emperor of the Crazy People; Thomas Massie, taking a break from running interference for the Covington punks, and the rancid presence that is Scott DeJarlais of Tennessee. I will bet a shiny buffalo nickel that none of these votes had anything to do with geopolitics or instability on the Balkan peninsula.

Rather, these votes were an attempt to curry favor down at Camp Runamuck, and an attempt by the Freedom Caucus to assert some vestige of the influence it used to wield when the Republicans held the majority and the FC held Paul Ryan's balls in cold storage somewhere in Anacostia. It's still something I never thought I'd see, though.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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