Question: “Is Congress like the Kilkenny Cats?”

Updat­ed from “Churchill and the Kilken­ny Cats,” 2012… A Churchillian friend who has writ­ten to her Sen­a­tors writes: “This brief video by Sen­a­tor Rand Paul is a good exam­ple of why the Unit­ed States Con­gress has only a 10% approval rating.

“Who is in charge in the clat­ter­ing train? The video explains why the Con­gresshu­mans are an insult to the Amer­i­can peo­ple.” (Sen­a­tor Paul, on a point of order, was demand­ing extra time to read a 600-page Sen­ate bill sched­uled for an up or down vote in eight hours.)

I’ve giv­en up on the U.S. Sen­ate, myself. (And late­ly, the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives with it.) I’m glad some­body is still writ­ing them letters.

Churchill invokes the Cats of Kilkenny

Nat­u­ral­ly there is a Churchill quo­ta­tion which suits the habit­u­al behav­ior of the Unit­ed States Con­gress. (There is a Churchill quo­ta­tion for just about every­thing.) Speak­ing in the House of Com­mons on 18 March 1912, young Win­ston remarked:

We must expect that in a fleet bat­tle between good and effi­cient navies equal­ly matched, tremen­dous dam­age will be rec­i­p­ro­cal­ly inflict­ed…. Indeed, the more we force our­selves to pic­ture the hideous course of a mod­ern naval engage­ment, the more one is inclined to believe that it will resem­ble the con­test between Mamil­ius and Her­minius at the Bat­tle of Lake Regillus, or the still more home­ly con­flict of the Kilken­ny cats. That is a very sat­is­fac­to­ry reflec­tion for the stronger naval Pow­er. It will always pay the stronger naval Pow­er to lose ship for ship in every class.

From Churchill by Him­self, pages 226-27: “The Bat­tle, pos­si­bly myth­i­cal, was described in Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome, which fas­ci­nat­ed WSC as a boy. It was a Roman vic­to­ry, led by Mamil­ius over Her­minius and the Etr­uscans, pos­si­bly between 509 and 493 BC.

The Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary describes a Kilken­ny cat as ‘one of a pair of cats fabled to have fought until only their tails remained.’ Hence the phrase describes ‘com­bat­ants who fight until they anni­hi­late each oth­er.'” (The cats were from Coun­ty Kilken­ny, Ireland)….

There once were two cats of Kilkenny,
Each thought there was one cat too many.
So they fought and they fit,
And they scratched and they bit
Till, except­ing their nails
And the tips of their tails
Instead of two cats there wer’n’t any.