Day: January 7, 2023

Late on Friday night – so late that it was technically Saturday morning – House Republicans finally managed to elect Kevin McCarthy as Speaker on their fifteenth ballot, just minutes after House Republican Mike Rogers had to be held back from lunging at alleged underage sex trafficker Matt Gaetz. It was the perfect metaphor for everything that’s gone so horribly wrong for the Republican Party.

Whatever Gaetz and his fellow lunatic caucus members were trying to accomplish for themselves by dragging this out all week, what they’ve really done is sabotage House Republicans’ prospects for accomplishing anything these next two years. Kevin McCarthy will take office as the weakest and most illegitimate “Speaker” of all time, and the lead story each day will be how long he lasts on the job before these same lunatic caucus members decide to oust him.

House Republicans are taking power with no agenda, no cohesion, no strategy, and no clue. They’re stuck trying to push an unpopular agenda centered around shutting down the government and carrying out nonsense investigations, which they largely won’t be able to pull off anyway.

Donald Trump spent years helping usher these lunatic House Republican candidates into office, and now we’re seeing that come home to roost. It took them fifteen tries and the verge of a brawl just to narrowly elect a Speaker. Their “coalition” – which doesn’t really exist as it is – will fall apart near immediately. As embarrassing as this past week has been for House Republicans, they’re going to find ways to humiliate themselves even worse than what we’ve just seen.

Kevin McCarthy was never likely to last particularly long as Speaker to begin with. Given how severely the lunatic caucus damaged him this week before finally electing him, McCarthy might not last the winter. These House Republicans, who are each only in it for themselves and have no real leader to even try to unite them, are going to eat each other alive. This is going to be a dumpster fire. And the effort to elect a Democratic House in 2024 (or sooner) starts now.

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