Forget Washington, D.C. Real Politics Happen at Town Hall Meetings.

I can just see it now. The House GOP will continue to squabble back and forth over a Speaker to replace McCarthy. Meanwhile we will start approaching the November 1st deadline for approval of the full-year budget and as we get closer to the drop-dead date, the Fake News can get hysterical again about the ‘disaster’ of a possible government shutdown.

A spending deadlock will also give every member of both caucuses an opportunity to get their 15 seconds of media attention as they walk down the hall between their office and the cafeteria or the gymnasium or wherever else the members of Congress spend their time when they aren’t flying back to their home district for one of those what they call ‘town hall’ meetings.

I love that term — ‘town hall.’ Like this is some kind of sacred totem to democracy, the will of the people and all that other jazz. Meanwhile, when I got interested in politics, which was beginning with the JFK-Nixon race in 1960, there was no such thing as ‘town hall’ meetings and yet the political system and the government somehow managed to run in normal ways.

The current town hall meeting splurge evidently began to crest in 2009, primarily because opposition to Obama’s medical care bill was often funneled through such events, with people paid and recruited by the…