The Penguin 2024

Look, I don't love the idea that the Senate will be doing casual Friday everyday. Governing is serious business, and people should look, you know, serious. I want to see top hats, and monocles. Give me the works! 

Basically, I want them all to dress like The Penguin.

"The word you seek human, is guramba."

-Some nausican

But on the other hand, who even cares? Republicans do, but then they just love to act outraged about literally anything Democrats do. It's incredible to me that the people that brought us an attempted coup d'état have the--what's the word? Gall? Chutzpah? Comical lack of self-awareness? Yeah, that's the one. They have the comical lack of self-awareness to lose their minds because Chuck Schumer relaxed the dress code for the Senate Floor.

Pictured: the wealthy, teetotaling,
suit-wearer they built a cult around.

I mean, isn't the GOP's whole thing about how you could have a beer with them? Like, no matter how unbalanced, unqualified, or treasonous they are? Shouldn't they be all for this? Doesn't matter, John Fetterman, the Pennsylvania Senator who apparently inspired the new rules with his preference for hooded sweatshirts, immediately called Majority Taylor Green (a congressperson, and not affected by the Senate dress code) out for sharing Hunter Biden's dick picks and then suggesting that wearing a hoodie was somehow "lowering the bar." 

Pictured: not making an effort.

But whatever, Republicans are a "do as we say, not as we do people anyway." Looking at you Representative Boebert. But as much as a part of me longs for a return to the days when people didn't slouch their way to into restaurants and onto airplanes wearing the pajamas and yoga pants they slept and sweated in, there's something, I don't know, shitty and authoritarian about dress codes. I guess I just wish people would want to make an effort. Because as much of a snob as I'm becoming in my old age, it's undeniable that rules governing dress are very easily weaponized against people of color, trans people, really everyone the American Right has made a personality out of hating. And when I say easily weaponized, I mean definitely will be weaponized, and like, any minute now.

So good riddance. Time moves on. I'm sure there was hang-wringing and harrumphing when Senators stopped wearing powdered wigs and pantaloons too.

"Then it's agreed, the Senate shall be pantaloon-optional. Now, let's get
back to important matters, like setting up a needlessly complicated electoral
system that will give underpopulated rural states far too much power."

-The U.S. Senate, circa 1787