Actually, it’s unclear as I write this if they’ll be gone until then or if they’ll continue the sit-in in smaller groups over the recess. John Lewis says they’ll be back on July 5th but Debbie Wasserman Schultz said this morning that the protest will continue in shifts going forward. Shifts and late-night pizza deliveries — just like they had at Selma.

The original title of this post, before the news about Democrats giving up broke in, was “Which reporter will be the first to masturbate on-air over the sit-in?” The competition is, shall we say, stiff — CNN was literally counting the hours with an on-screen graphic this morning — but the smart money’s on young Luke Russert, who was even more breathless than his colleagues in repeating the media talking point du jour. Emphasizing that the sit-in is historic is a neat way of not talking about the other things it is — a precedent that’ll be used by future House minority parties to unfairly obstruct the majority, an insult to the civil-rights movement in adopting a signature tactic in order to oppose the right of due process, and a bizarre turn for progressives who spent the better part of eight years under Bush criticizing arbitrary terror watch lists. The phrase “virtue-signaling” is thrown around a lot by partisans, but if there’s any value to the sit-in I think it’s how it shows that being anti-gun is now such a supreme virtue in progressive minds that it really can’t be signaled loudly enough, even if that means taking a dump on other important virtues, like due process, that you used to claim were sacred. Would they stage a sit-in like this over literally anything else? The only issue I can think of is abortion. But since they always win on abortion, at least at the federal level, no demonstrations are required.

It’s nice, at least, to see Democrats appreciative of the hard work their associates in the media have been doing for them:

Larry already touched on a few lowlights from last night but I’ll give you two more to enjoy, one of the mob being triggered by Paul Ryan as he invades their safe space and the other of Democrats surreally singing “We Shall Overcome,” another nod at the civil-rights movement, to try to further inoculate themselves from the reality that they’re rallying to hand government the power to strip people of their constitutional rights on mere suspicion. I honestly wonder if this thing would have come off had John Lewis not been involved; he was their talisman against the inevitable criticism that this was an anti-civil-rights protest at bottom. Exit question via Breitbart: Should Paul Ryan have done more to stop the Democrats? Having them arrested would have given them the media martyrdom they’re desperate for, but he could have simply turned off the lights, locked the doors, and so forth. Ah well. He’s a nice young man. It was nice of him to give the geriatric burnouts in the House Dem caucus a chance to relive their glory days for an evening.