House Republicans Desperately Seeking A Lady, Any Lady, To Make Them Not Look So Bad

Aw, are Republicans have another lady problem? It's been 24 hours, so yeah, that sounds about right:  

When House Administration Committee Chairwoman Candice Miller retires and hands over her gavel next year, GOP leaders will be facing a familiar quandary: finding another female lawmaker to lead a committee.

Miller, a Michigan Republican, is the only woman among the 21 GOP committee chairs. And leadership — cognizant of the poor optics of a potential all-white, male lineup — will be scrambling to replace her.

“If we don’t have a woman chairman, that will be a big problem,” said a former GOP leadership aide.

Oh, you mean it's awful hard to insist that Democrats are THE REAL SEXISTS when your party is mostly made up of old white dudes who don't like ladies and are always trying to tell ladies to shut up, close their legs, and get in the kitchen and heat 'em up a Hungry Man? And while the GOP will happily parade its tiny handful of women on stage during a convention -- smile for the camera, ladies! -- it's not like they want them to be in charge of anything, because COME ON.

But gosh, even the GOP dudes recognize that not having a single lady in charge of a single committee in the entire House of Representatives looks bad. The real trick is finding one. Because while there are 88 women in the House, the vast majority of them are Democrats (huh, weird!), and even among the 23 lady Republicans, most of them haven't been around very long and therefore have no seniority, compared with all of the menfolk whodeservethose leadership roles, huh even weirder!

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It's an unfortunate coincidence that a party that can barely go a day without saying some dumb thing about women has a hard time wooing women and recruiting women and letting women hold positions of power. Darn the luck! Even if they realize it would look a lot better if they could figure out how to do that so maybe Democrats -- and oh, hey, Republican women -- would stop talking about how terrible the party is when it comes to women and sometimes even women in the Republican Party have to explain to the men why they can't support some idiotic bill they actually support in their hearts because of how bad it makes them look with the lady types.

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Meanwhile, in a COMPLETELY unrelated story, Senate Republicans tried to sneak another (sigh) anti-abortion measure into what had been a bipartisan bill to address human trafficking, which has nothing to do with abortion. Because it's always a good time to try to permanently enact the Hyde Amendment that prohibits government funding of abortion -- if you are a Republican. Shockingly, Democrats have now refused to support the bill, because they're on this real fun power trip lately where they're really enjoying saying "Nope, not gonna let you do that" to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell whenever he tries to cram unrelated provisions into important bills (like, uh, an "Obama sucks" provision in a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security, just to randomly pick a totally random example).

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But McConnell -- a member of the party thatreallycares about women, remember? -- can't believe Democrats are obstructing his once-uncontroversial bill just because his party tucked some bullshit abortion restrictions into it:

"Special interests," huh? That would be the ladies Republicans care oh-so-much about, the ladies they're trying desperately to appeal to, right? Yeah, it continues to be a real mystery why they're having such a hard time finding any of those.

[ The Hill ]