Sort of facetiously, I asked yesterday on Twitter:
Who sits with Joe Wilson? RT @PoliticalTicker: Legislators pairing off for bipartisan seating at Obama speech – http://bit.ly/eHQkvc
It didn’t occur to me until today to ask the questions seriously, which I did after I read this at The Fix:
When the Democratic centrist group Third Way proposed the idea of members of different parties sitting next to one another at tomorrow’s State of the Union speech, there was considerable skepticism that it would happen.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), for one, said that people are “more interested in actual accomplishments on a bipartisan basis here in the next six to nine months than they are with the seating arrangement at the State of the Union.”
And yet a number of members have signed up — including Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.), whose “You lie!” outburst during a speech by President Obama last fall is frequently cited as a sign of partisan incivility in Congress.
So without reading further in that piece (which would have given me my answer), I e-mailed Neal Patel of Joe’s staff to ask who his bipartisan buddies would be, and immediately got this response:
Susan Davis from California and Madeleine Bordallo from Guam. Both are HASC members.
Rep. Bordallo
Rep. Davis
Then I saw that Joe had Tweeted earlier that he was “Honored to be sitting” with those two ladies. Presumably, they are, too. And they’ve already worked together on some stuff, according to The Fix: “Davis and Wilson teamed up last year on a military pay raise bill. In 2007, Bordallo and Wilson traveled to Afghanistan together.”
This will be interesting. But whatever happens — and I’m thinking it all goes well, with no new outbursts (partly because the first one was uncharacteristic of Joe, but also because, well, we Southern boys tend to act better in the presence of ladies) — I appreciate that Joe was up for this. As I heard someone saying on the radio over the weekend, this sitting-together thing won’t likely change the world, but it couldn’t hurt.
There's just so much more temptation to get rowdy when you're sitting with your boys.
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Well, I took Joe personally to task–in a perfectly nice way, of course (just ask my wife, she can vouch for me) for his outburst when I met him at the polling place (Saxe Gotha Pres.) in Lexington in November. Don’t know if it registered with him, or not, but assuming he endorses Christian values, I quoted Scripture to him: ‘you shall not speak evil of a ruler of your people.’ Who knows–I’d like to think it helped?
Excuse me; I guess I should have written, respectfully, Rep. Wilson.