A great country should expect better.

Rep. Al Greene, D-Texas, disrupts President Donald Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, March 4, 2025, and is escorted out. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Since President Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress Tuesday evening, much has been written and said about the Democrats’ childish behavior in the House chamber. I kept picturing a two-year-old flinging her cereal bowl from the tray of her highchair. It was all embarrassing, beneath the dignity of the institution and ultimately pointless.

Others have given a detailed recounting. Permit me only to add that I lament that Al Greene is from Texas.

Instead, let’s just say that if you can’t applaud for bringing a moment of sunshine into the life of a 13-year-old boy who otherwise lives under the constant dark cloud of brain cancer, there’s something truly wrong with you.

So long as Democrats keep doubling down on stupid with their silly tantrums and their ad nauseum characterizations of Trump as Hitler and his supporters as racist, bigoted, homophobic, uncultured Neanderthals, the prospects for Republican electoral success will be bright. The Democrats’ far left lunacy may still play well in the cloistered coastal enclaves where elite liberals tend to cluster. But it appalls people in the heartland of the country. Democrats are losing the people who feed us, defend us, fix our machines, stock our shelves, clean up after us, pay their taxes and do their best to raise responsible children. Many in that great middle-of-the-country, middle-of-the-political-road-cohort once voted Democrat. It was their votes for Donald Trump that made the critical difference last November.

Conservative pundits might look upon the Democrats’ self-immolation as good news. And in the short term, they’re probably right.

But in the bigger picture – the picture that includes the long-term health of the republic – I’m one who looks upon the Democrats and wishes they’d get better.

A healthy society needs robust competition in the marketplace of ideas. Businesses and organizations that don’t face worthy competition become complacent and lazy. Political parties that lack principled competition become vulnerable to their own excesses.

The Dallas Cowboys of the mid 1990s were certainly great because they had great players and a great coach. (His name was Jimmy Johnson, Jerry. He’d likely have won you many more championships if you hadn’t childishly run him off.) But the 1990s Cowboys were also great because they knew they had to face the San Francisco 49ers.

I remember the Democratic Party that was once the party of Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Joe Lieberman. Democrats of that era may have been wrong in the eyes of their Republican opponents. But those Democrats were principled in their positions and the Sturm & Drang of politics notwithstanding, largely decorous in their pursuit of them.

And by and large, the country thrived.

That Democratic Party is long gone. In its place are the glum faces, pink dresses, idiotic protest paddles and foaming-at-the-mouth outbursts of Tuesday night.

It’s hard not to take delight watching the Democrats dig their hole even deeper. But for Republicans to be at their best, and for the nation to truly hit its peak, I wish the Democrats would get better.