We did a better job electing our class president in junior high school than House Republicans have done electing a Speaker

Jim Jordan looking for votes in a House corridor earlier today.

Just eight Republican loons kept Kevin McCarthy up all night in January selling off chunks of his soul to the likes of Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene to finally be elected Speaker for a great big nine months.  Today in the first ballot taken in the Republican conference, 81 of his fellow Republicans voted against the execrable Jim Jordan, leaving the Speakership up for grabs. Hours later, House Republicans took a second  ballot.  With 152 Republicans voting for him this time, and one voting “present,” Jordan was left 65 votes short of what he would need to win the Speakership vote on the House floor.

With war already declared in Israel, Ukraine fighting for its life along a 600-mile front against Putin’s army, and only 30 days remaining before a stopgap funding bill runs out and another vote looms to avert a government shutdown, what did House Republicans do?  Why, they adjourned for the weekend and headed off to Reagan National Airport for their flights home.

And get this:  the stopgap funding bill passed on September 29 with 83 more Democrats voting for it, meaning that 126 Republicans voted to shut down the government.

Meanwhile, Hakeem Jeffries has all 212 Democratic votes when – or perhaps we should say if -- the vote for Speaker comes up in the House again.  Some so-called moderate Republican members of the House are already talking about forming a coalition with Democrats to lead the House…as if anything that logical would ever come to pass.  If the Republicans were to take the vote to the full House right now, Jordan would need 93 more Republican votes than he has to be elected Speaker, and according to Political Wire, there are “at least 20 ‘hard nos’ against Jordan.”  Taegan Goddard, editor of Political Wire, won the week with his headline today: “The House GOP’s Murder-Suicide.”

Meanwhile, putative Republican “leader” Donald Trump praised Matt Gaetz today for doing Republicans “a tremendous favor” for getting rid of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy. “Kevin was doing a lot of the Obama work,” Trump said.  “He was working on the budget and getting something approved that, you know, we could have gotten a lot for, and the debt ceiling, everybody was hurt with that.”  

“Everybody” being of course Trump himself as he, as usual, ignored the damage House Republicans are doing to the country, not to mention the world with two ongoing wars, the climate crisis, and political tensions causing coups in Africa.  But who cares about coups in Africa, except perhaps as something to study for the future, right?

Said Representative Austin Scott, of Georgia, who announced his candidacy to run against Jordan for the Speakership just one hour before the deadline today, “If we’re going to be the majority party, we need to act like it. I care more about the conference and us doing our job than I care about who the speaker is.”

That sentiment and 2,500 frequent flyer miles probably got him an upgrade on his flight home to Georgia this afternoon. Extra legroom is about as much as we can hope for from these unpatriotic clowns.