One could advance any number of compelling arguments against the Biden administration’s reported desire to institute a nationwide ban on gas stoves. One could note that such prohibitions are clearly not within the federal government’s constitutional powers. One could question the president’s priorities in a time of inflation and consumer alarm. One could observe that the study that has led the administration to consider outlawing gas stoves is ridiculously — and deliberately — flawed. One could even ask how such a measure — which would make many forms of ethnic cooking more difficult — could be squared with all that fashionable talk of systemic implicit racial bias. And yet to offer any of these objections would ultimately be counterproductive, insofar as it would signal an acceptance of the premise underlying the policy, which is that this is the sort of matter that a free people should expect their federal government to superintend.

I do not accept this premise, and, as a result, I must offer up a response wholly different from the ones above. Namely: Bugger off.

That’s right. The correct response here is a rather simple one, all told: Go away. Leave us alone. Stick your ludicrous propositions where the sun don’t shine.

As those who contrived it made abundantly clear, we did not institute a federal government so that it could micromanage us to the point at which it is determining which cooking equipment we are permitted to feature inside our own homes. That is a private matter — a matter in which the powers that be ought to have no say.

For more than a century now, Americans have been cooking with gas — and, clearly, many of them still wish to do so. Indeed, until yesterday morning, nobody had thought much about this at all. There is no Anti-Flicker League, no Mothers Against Gas Stoves. This whole thing has been a top-down affair, contrived by the terminally bored. At some point in the last couple of years, a bunch of hyperactive progressives decided that gas stoves might be a good candidate for their next moral crusade, and, after a cursory review of the idea, they elected to go for it. As the drive progressed, the justification for it changed: First, the impetus was climate change, then it was health, and, if these fail, it will become something else — the perils of living in the same house as plastic knobs, perhaps. But really, these are just pretexts. The true purpose of the effort is to advance a cause in the hope of feeling fulfilled.

As usual, the press has allowed itself to be entirely co-opted. In the summer of 2021, the New York Times was advising its readers that the “provocative headlines” that activists had secured “have cooked up a scare that we don’t think is warranted.” The Times’ happy conclusion? “You don’t actually need to freak out.”

But that was then — before such views became unfashionable, and before those who voiced them were called racists and antediluvians and climate-change deniers. And so, of course, the piece was subsequently updated. “We’ve changed our advice,” the prepended note reads, “and no longer recommend hanging on to your gas stove for as long as it works.” Naturally.

George Orwell believed that to picture the future, one needed only to imagine “a boot stamping on a human face forever,” but, as it turned out, this was far too dramatic an augury. In 2023, the federal government doesn’t so much trample us to death as bore us into the grave. The nagging is endless. “Don’t say that!” “Don’t drink this!” “Don’t eat that!” “Don’t drive!” “I wonder if you know that your swimming pool is dangerous?”

And the thing is: Yeah, I do know that swimming pools can be dangerous. I do know that driving is more dangerous than flying. I do know that I’d probably live longer if I skipped that steak and had a salad, and that that fourth glass of wine is bad for me. I do know that candles are more likely to cause fires than light bulbs are, that having sex is more dangerous than celibacy, and that going to rock concerts or football games is bad for my hearing. I just don’t care — or, if I do care, I don’t think it’s any of Washington, D.C.’s business to work out where my line is. Frankly, most of the “science” that’s being sold by the Anti-Stove Brigade seems extremely thin to me, but, even if it weren’t, I still wouldn’t give a toss about it, because I’m an adult, and I’m aware that life is full of trade-offs. In their latest iteration, the Safetyists insist that homes with gas stoves are slightly more likely to yield asthmatics than homes without. Okay — arguendo, let’s assume that’s true. It’s also true that homes with gas stoves are more likely to yield good cooking — and that, if you’re using a wok or cooking roti or what you will, gas is pretty much imperative. Who gets to decide which of these matters more? Some humdrum grinch at the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), or me? I’m sorry, I thought this was America.

I have come increasingly to suspect that the deepest fault line in these United States lies not between people on the “left” and the “right,” or between the Republicans and the Democrats, or between the north and the south, but between the sort of person who spends their days wondering how many more hours they might be able to eke out if they lived in a pillow-lined concrete bunker, and the sort of person who intuits somewhere deep down in their soul that a world without any rough edges is a world that is less worth living in.

Justifying the administration’s proposed move, CPSC commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. explained that “products that can’t be made safe can be banned.” What, I wonder, would be excluded from that definition?

On second thought, forget I asked. I wouldn’t want to give him any ideas.

Later came an update from Ari Blaff:

The press wants to portray the ongoing speakership election as chaos. What political observers are actually experiencing is a rare vote in Congress where the outcome is not already known in advance. More votes should be this way.

Adding to the purported chaos is the fact that the members of the House are actually in the Capitol, together, at the same time. This, too, is a welcome reprieve from legislative life under the proxy-voting rules Democrats used when they controlled the chamber, supposedly over Covid concerns. It’s also welcome because the House has not been accustomed to assembling all at once for years, pandemic or not.

The rows of chairs in a semicircle before the rostrum under “In God We Trust” that most people envision when they think of Congress are only usually occupied simultaneously during the State of the Union address. The legislative branch has atrophied so much that one of the only times members all get together is when the leader of the executive branch pays them a visit.

What we’re seeing in the House isn’t chaos. It’s what Congress is supposed to be.

The word “congress” comes from the Latin word “congredi,” meaning “to come together.” The point of Congress is for legislators who are independently elected by constituents from separate, geographically defined districts to come together in the Capitol and argue. In the House, those arguments are supposed to be raucous.

The problem is that the people demanding these changes are by and large unserious. Chip Roy (R., Texas) is being serious, but Matt Gaetz (R., Fla.), who has now started voting for Donald Trump as speaker, is not, and Lauren Boebert (R., Colo.) is so ridiculous even Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.) has had enough. And no one has yet offered a viable alternative to McCarthy who could win over the GOP conference. McCarthy has made numerous concessions that holdouts say they want, and yet they still won’t vote for him.

But nowhere in the Constitution is any level of seriousness required for House members. You only have to be 25 or older, have been a U.S. citizen for seven years, and live in the state you represent. Federalist No. 52 says of the House that “the door of this part of the federal government is open to merit of every description.”

That includes whatever description applies to Gaetz and Boebert. They are exercising their legitimate privileges as duly elected members of Congress. You get to be a troll in the United States House of Representatives. Some Americans are trolls, and they get representation, too. Congressmen have been at this for a very long time. As Dan McLaughlin concluded after surveying a history of raucous speakership battles, “The House may often be a mess, but it’s a very American mess.”

From a political party’s point of view, it may be wise to clamp down on disruptive members. Party leadership has any number of ways of doing so with committee assignments and legislative priorities when in office. At the election stage, there are two major ways to keep the trolls at bay. The first is defeating them in primary elections, by recruiting and funding sounder candidates. The second is by winning a large enough majority that the trolls don’t matter.

McCarthy failed to do either of those things. The GOP has been notoriously tolerant of shenanigans from members in safe GOP districts. And McCarthy’s leadership in the last election cycle failed to deliver the majority the GOP should have gotten, given that the incumbent Democratic president is unpopular and responsible for a variety of policy failures, and his party was facing the voters for the first time after his election.

Now McCarthy has to deal with the trolls, and he’s not up to the task. His case to the GOP conference was, “I earned this job,” and he has so far insisted on remaining a candidate. Not enough GOP House members agree with his claim, and they seem content to keep making their feelings known, as many times as the clerk calls the roll.

Part of the reason the GOP doesn’t have a majority as large as it should was Donald Trump’s endorsements in winnable House races that ended up handing seats to Democrats because Trump’s preferred Republican nominees were unpalatable to the general electorate. Instead of foreseeing that possibility, McCarthy attached himself to Trump at the hip and, even after seeing the ill effects of Trump’s actions, remains so affixed. He continued touting his endorsement from Trump and urging GOP House members to vote for him. They’re ignoring him.

Which is good. It should not matter in the slightest who Donald Trump thinks the speaker should be. He’s a proven election loser, but more fundamentally, he’s not a House member. The speakership contest is a constitutionally mandated decision that lies solely in House members’ hands.

The House is not in chaos right now. The House is acting like a legislature. We’re so used to seeing it act like a servant to the executive or like a stage for cable-news hits that we’ve forgotten what a legislature looks like. As Yuval Levin wrote, it would be preferable if this legislative behavior was in pursuit of something more worthwhile. But Congress has to start somewhere to regain its legislative capabilities, and this contest, despite all its nonsense, is a start.