All night on Wednesday, the House of Representatives organized itself into committees so as to perform a pre-emptive autopsy on the dead fish of a health care bill that Paul Ryan and the congressional leadership has bestowed upon the nation. One of the committees was the House Energy and Commerce Committee on which serves Congressman Joseph Kennedy III, son of Congressman Joe, grandson of Senator Robert F., and grand-nephew of President John F. and Senator Edward M.

He had some concerns about the bill and, more to the point, he had more serious concerns about the people pushing the bill, specifically, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin who is (putatively) in charge of the House. From The Boston Globe:

"I was struck last night by a comment that I heard made by Speaker Ryan, where he called this repeal bill 'an act of mercy.' With all due respect to our speaker, he and I must have read different Scripture…The one I read calls on us to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to shelter the homeless, and to comfort the sick. It reminds us that we are judged not by how we treat the powerful, but by how we care for the least among us. There is no mercy in a system that makes health care a luxury. There is no mercy in a country that turns their back on those most in need of protection: the elderly, the poor, the sick, and the suffering. There is no mercy in a cold shoulder to the mentally ill. This is not an act of mercy. It is an act of malice."

A mark, that will surely leave.

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There are a couple of interesting things going on here. The relationship of the political Kennedys to their Roman Catholicism always has been kaleidoscopic; the congressman's grandfather was the closest thing to a cleric that the clan ever produced while his great-uncle had the same ironic distance from holy mother Church that he had from everything else. There historically has been a kind of yawing between the strict Jansenist Catholicism of matriarch Rose, who wrote off one of her daughters for the mortal of sin of marrying a British Protestant and the pragmatic American Catholicism of patriarch Joe, who knew that his golden dreams for his sons weren't possible in Boston without the Church's winking imprimatur. In this latest manifestation, the congressman plainly comes in the tradition of his grandfather, especially tapping into the spiritual energy behind the 1968 presidential campaign.

Even more telling is the fact that a Democratic congressman in his third term was willing publicly to take a chunk out of the Speaker of the House. This was a shot beyond partisanship and it indicates that, perhaps, the Democratic minority in the House senses that Ryan has made a blunder in pushing this bill without having his own house in order, so to speak.

Ryan faces a serious mutiny on his right flank, which the president* complicated on Wednesday by offering a sweetener to obstreperous congressional conservatives. (Of course, Ryan also has been targeted outside of Congress by the flying monkeys of the right, perhaps even including Steve Bannon in the White House.) If Congressman Kennedy is willing to whack the Speaker over the head with the gospels, then the cracks are becoming harder to paper over. Sooner or later, the roof falls in.

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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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