Give him a trophy and send him home

I’ve watched a lot of C-Span in the last couple of days, probably to the point where I can comfortably say I’ve spent more time watching C-Span in the last week than I’ve watched in my entire life leading up to this last week.

The problem, of course, is that the Republican Party’s one major belief for my entire life is that government is fundamentally useless and isn’t any good for anything. And when you keep electing people who believe that, you aren’t electing people who actually have any good reason to go into office and govern well. That would prove their central premise wrong. They’re not going to do that. And right now it is abundantly fucking clear that the Republicans have sent at least 20 people in to office who have absolutely no interest in anything other than claiming Kevin McCarthy’s scalp. And since in Kevin McCarthy we have someone who has no principles other than his desire to be Speaker, and the Democrats don’t quite have enough people to get Hakeem Jeffries into office on their own, well … you get this.

The usual chatterers are chattering that oh this time it looks like there’s a deal, but I’ve got C-Span on while I’m writing this, and Matt Gaetz, who didn’t vote for the shitgibbon last round after voting for him in the other rounds today, just officially nominated him, so … there’s no deal. There’s not going to be a deal. You can’t negotiate with people whose only position is that you should not exist. And the nutcase rump of the Republican party’s only position is that Kevin McCarthy shouldn’t be Speaker, so there’s no deal he can put forward that will assuage that. It’s not going to happen.

(Now that I’ve said that, he’ll win this round, of course, because I am never right about politics. But it will be super fun to watch the insurrectionists vote against the shitgibbon.)

This is round eleven, and so far we have not seen six Republicans willing to cross the aisle and vote for Jefferies, nor have we seen the necessary number agree to vote present so that the guy who has won every single round of voting so far can be named Speaker.

There’s somebody else up doing nominations right now, so the Not Kevins can’t even decide on which Not Kevin to stand up behind, because it doesn’t matter.

Whee.