The House of Shame

An old photo from Fountain Square by Lil Ol Me

As I write this the 118th Congress of these United States is on it’s second day of voting to appoint the Speaker of the House of Representatives. With a narrow majority, the presumed front runner, last sessions’ Republican Minority Leader, Kevin McCarty of California’s 20th district, was still trying to wrangle a bakers dozen or so votes from the grip of the farthest right of the far right Freedom Caucus.

If the fact that four years of slavering loyalty to Donald Trump wasn’t enough to convince his fellow GOP congresscritters to support him doesn’t schaden your freude enough, Kevin has also agreed to a ludicrous array of rules changes that would essentially turn the Speaker’s office into a clubhouse for Jim Jordan (R-Ohio, we’re so sorry,) and his cronies. And we should know better than to let Jordan near any clubhouses.

It is absolutely hilarious to see a vaguely human shaped worm like McCarty try to bargain his way into the job that drove the last Republican speakers to “spend more time with their family,” land, mostly thanks to the very same people now blocking his bid.

At the same time it is disappointing that the heaviest resistance to a McCarty Speakership is coming from the far right. It’s not like Kevin is some sort of mushy snowflake, he’s a full fledged MAGA disciple who has made it clear that he plans to spend the next two years shoving congressional subpoenas up the nethers of everyone from Hunter Biden to Anthony Fauci to The AFLAC Duck. Like the Freedom Caucus, he’s a chaos agent who isn’t all that interested in anything beyond owning the libs and feathering his own nest.

Why isn’t there a bloc of moderate congressmongrels willing to cut a back door deal with impending Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to get an actual public servant into the job? They don’t have to be a flag burning radical, just someone more interested in policy than in auditioning for a job at Newsmax.

There’s probably a good reason, and that is what is truly frightening about the GOP today.

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