Americans watching this week’s NewsNation town hall at the Kennedy Center saw a moment of rare clarity when Stephen A. Smith stopped playing the partisan game and called out the people in power for their indifference to working families. The town hall’s testimony from a 16-year FAA air traffic controller who said he had to drive for DoorDash to pay his daughter’s tuition put a human face on the shutdown’s damage and exposed the moral rot in Washington.
That worker’s story should have made every lawmaker in the room hang their head and run for the exits, but instead we watched them posture and bicker while the man who keeps the skies safe gets no paycheck. Stephen A. didn’t couch it in pundit-speak; he named the obvious injustice—Americans keep paying taxes, the national debt climbs, and regular people are left to scramble while elites collect their salary.
When Smith stood up and walked off the stage, he wasn’t performing for applause, he was expressing a frustration millions of Americans feel: enough of this theater. That raw reaction should wake up both parties, because voters aren’t interested in blame games or clever talking points while their neighbors go without. The optics of members of Congress trading barbs on stage while a frontline worker is forced into gig work are politically poisonous, and rightly so.
Conservatives should welcome his outrage, not dismiss it because it came from someone who usually speaks about sports. Patriotism means defending the people who keep our country running, not defending a broken system that rewards Washington insiders. If Smith’s moment moves even a few lawmakers to put principle before politics, it will have done more for the country than months of backroom deals and press releases ever will.
Make no mistake: this shutdown is the result of cowardice and calculation in equal measure, and the comfortable posture of many politicians is part of the problem. Voters are right to be furious that those who create the chaos don’t feel its sting the same way the rest of us do. Stephen A.’s bluntness is a reminder that anger at Washington is legitimate and that both parties share responsibility for fixing this mess.
Republicans who pretend to be the defenders of working people should stop lecturing and start legislating solutions that protect paychecks and punish paralysis. If Congressional leadership won’t put real pressure on colleagues to reopen the government, then voters must at the ballot box—there are consequences for passing the buck. This is not a time for Washington’s usual preening; it’s a time for accountability and for doing right by those who keep America safe and moving.
Stephen A. gave voice to a sentiment conservatives have held for years: government should serve citizens, not the other way around. Let his walk-off be a wake-up call to the GOP to stop treating every crisis as a talking point and to the media to stop normalizing the status quo. We owe hardworking Americans more than platitudes; we owe them results.
If nothing else, the Kennedy Center moment should remind every patriot that populist anger isn’t a phase—it’s a demand for adults in Washington to do the job they were elected to do. Keep your eye on the voters who saw that air traffic controller stand up and tell his truth; come election day, they will remember who fought for them and who kept them down. America deserves leaders who put country over career, and that’s a standard every conservative should proudly defend.
