John Mica, the House Transportation Committee chair who played a big role in shutting down the FAA,
haz a sad, telling Dana Milbank that "I’ve had a brutal week, getting beat up by everybody" and:
"People don’t have to get so personal," he said with a sigh. "A lot of people hate me now and think I’m the worst thing in the world for what I did." It’s "this sort of gotcha," he said, "that’s changed the dynamics of people working more effectively together."
This is hilarious. The guy who put tens of thousands of people out of work for two weeks by introducing subsidy cuts personally targeted at specific Democratic lawmakers in order to force Democrats to accept a plan making it virtually impossible for air workers to join unions is bemoaning things getting personal and gotchas that make it difficult for people to work effectively together? And he expects us to believe him when he talks about working together, effectively or otherwise?
Granted, he appears to have taken some hits at home, with at least one local paper slamming his role in the shutdown. And this was an issue on which Republicans presented a less unified front than usual, with Kay Bailey Hutchison having strong words against the House leaving town without a resolution and 16 House Republicans having earlier voted to strip the anti-union provision. So there may be some real chagrin (that he isn't invulnerable to consequences) and I'm sure there's real surprise that Democrats actually fought back.
But experienced Republican House members don't just call Dana Milbank to express their purely personal sorrow with no thoughts of how that might play into their future plans. There's an agenda here—the question is what it is. The most obvious guess is that Mica is trying to rehabilitate his reputation ahead of next month's battle over a long-term FAA bill (or another short-term one) in hopes that the Beltway press, thinking he learned his lesson, will give him the benefit of the doubt as he tries to strip union rights from workers on Delta's behalf. Milbank gets credit for giving Mica a hard time in this piece, but I'm not putting it past the dickwhisperer to think that a Milbankian chiding turned Mica's entire approach to legislation around and that as a result Mica's future unreasonable moves are reasonable. But that's just one possibility, and I'd consider it very much an open question where Mica was going with this "poor me, the Democrats got us by the short hairs and I got beat up bad" routine.