Congressional sit-in? What?

Last week, American television caught glimpses on an extraordinary — and amazing — event. The entire contingent of House Democrats was sitting on the floor of the House! They weren’t debating legislation; they weren’t presiding over their committee sessions; they weren’t making telephone calls to donors; they weren’t trying to help their constituents get straight with the bureaucracy.

THEY WERE SITTING ON THE FLOOR!!

ALL NIGHT!!

There they were, down on the floor in the well of the House, their ancient bones draped in designer suits and dresses, up and down to use the facilities every little while (some more often than others, and some more urgently), chatting away. Why were they there? No one seemed to know exactly. The House was not in session, the cameras were off, no legislation was being considered. What were they trying to accomplish? They said they wanted anti-gun legislation to pass the House, but they had already lost that vote. There is no known rule in the House of Representatives which provides for legislation to be introduced if enough old people sat on their rears overnight on the floor of the House.

Aside from the humor of the situation, how can such a peculiar activity be explained? One possibility is that the aged leadership was trying to re-live their youth. The leader was John Lewis, 76-year-old representative from Georgia. Mr. Lewis made his reputation in the 1950s and 1960s as an ardent civil rights leader and acolyte of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He remembers fondly the famous sit-ins of that era, which promoted the racial equality.

Many other members of Congress are of the same generation. If they are still liberals today, chances are good that they were liberal activists in that era also — sitting-in and marching for the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War causes of the time. They probably wore their hair and beards long, sang in hootenannies, defied the sexual taboos of the day, and were eventually identified as “hippies”. Seventy-six-year-old Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco was the national capital of hippie-land.

Those were the days! Most of the hippies grew up and turned more conservative as they took on the responsibilities of family and career. But not all. Many like Bill Ayers and Bernard Sanders have stayed hippies forever.

Perhaps John and Nancy and the rest of their generation were just re-living those days of wine and roses, as these aged hippies sat-in one last time for a cause, however fuzzy and obscure. Their younger followers joined the old folks to see what they had missed. Never mind that the message was entirely lost on 46-year-old House Speaker Paul Ryan.

He was so baffled by the sight of the senior leadership of the opposition party sitting all night on the lush blue carpet of the House of Representatives that he finally concluded that they were staging a photo-op for fundraising purposes. After he and his young cohorts recovered from their hysterical laughing spell. The picture of the prim Mrs. Pelosi struggling get down on the floor — and then trying to get up to go to the bathroom was just too much!

God bless the Democrats. They never fail to entertain.