Anthony Weiner is the biggest ideologue in the House. That’s why he might stay on through this session of Congress, or longer.

Anthony Weiner under pressure

True, Representative Anthony Weiner (D-NY-9) is under a lot of pressure. Everyone expected Republicans to say that he ought to resign his House seat. But now several Democrats have said it. Former Governor Tim Kaine of Virginia started it. Then Allyson Schwartz of Pennsylvania, the woman in charge of recruiting people to run in 2012, put in her two cents. That was only the beginning. Michael Michaud of Maine said that Weiner ought to walk away; his colleague in the House did not agree. Niki Tsongas became the only member of her Massachusetts delegation to ask Weiner to resign. (She is also the only female member of that delegation, as Boston Herald columnist Margery Eagan reminds her readers.) At least three other Democrats have joined in. This does not include former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who made an official referral to the House Standing Committee on Standards of Official Conduct (“the Ethics Committee”).

Why are they piling on?

To say that these Democrats are joining the chorus because a new off-color photo of Weiner is now available would be too easy. It also wouldn’t be true. Truth to tell, few Democrats (maybe Rep. Tsongas is one) even care about what one of their own does when he is not on the floor of the House or Senate. Oh, they might object if he tried to have a tryst in the chamber, or in the gallery, when the House was out of session. But to most of those people, members of the opposite sex are pieces of furniture, anyway—and that includes office furniture.

Those Democrats want Anthony Weiner gone for three reasons. None of those reasons is honorable.

They are:

1. The Democrats don’t need the embarrassment. Nancy Pelosi wants to be Speaker of the House again. Allyson Schwartz wants to help her there. The other Democrats are afraid that their own constituents will vote against them for their association with him.
2. Anthony Weiner is, by all accounts, a first-class, honest-to-God, obnoxious, graceless jerk. In his public appearances, he has displayed the same insulting manner that comes across in his official campaign website. (And by the way, he has not updated that site since May 25, three days before the scandal first broke.) The same abrasive, arrogant attitude that he showed toward Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly in the above video, he also displays to his fellow Democrats. Some of them have no doubt been waiting to take revenge for a long time. And Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) might be one of them.
3. The scandal could not have broken at a worse time. When it broke, Weiner and his fellow Democrats were talking about how Representative Paul Ryan (R-OH) had a “campaign to kill Medicare.” Now everyone’s talking about Anthony Weiner’s dirty pictures and dirty talk (though not about his dirty politics).

So what’s to like about him?

Anthony Weiner speaks to the Democracy in America meeting in New York in 2005. Photo: TL/Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0 Generic License

Democrats do not like Anthony Weiner. But most of them respect him. He says graceless things to and about people who disagree with the Democratic Party. The Democrats then shake their heads and wish that they had thought to say those things themselves.

Anthony Weiner says those things for the same reason that he would take an off-color photograph of himself and send even a Direct Message, let alone a public tweet (by mistake), to a total stranger who happened to be female. He has no shame. He has as little regard for good manners and polite conversation as for his wife and soon-to-be-born child. Rhetoric, to him, is one fight to the death after another. He is a gladiator, and his opponents are wild animals or maniacs, anyway. (And like the gladiators of ancient Rome, he has the lion’s share of female admirers.)

And the Democratic left hates non-leftists so much that they regard an Anthony Weiner as an inspiration. Now some Democrats (but not a single current national Democratic officeholder thus far) feel queasy about his sex-capades. They ought to feel queasy about his rude, boorish rhetoric, and his refusal to give his opponents credit for being human beings. And they ought to feel queasy about his voting for bills that violate the Constitution that he swore to “support and defend…against all enemies, foreign or domestic.”

Tellingly, the voters in his Brooklyn and Queens district do not want him to resign. Maybe they’re jerks, too. (Brooklyners have always had a nasty reputation.) More likely, they agree with his ideology—and ideology is all that matters anymore.

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Where do we sit?

That an ugly ideology of Demonic envy should have a first-class jerk like Anthony Weiner as its champion should surprise no one. That the left should have “willing dames enough” who “would to greatness dedicate themselves, finding it so inclin’d” is abundantly clear. Whether Anthony Weiner has at last been too big a jerk to survive is far from clear. That he has survived this long is because he is an ideologue in a party of ideologues, to whom the Constitution is either a “thing of wax” or an obstacle.

Featured Image: Anthony Weiner. Photo: New York Times/US House of Representatives.