It has now been more than twenty days since Kevin McCarthy was booted from the Speaker’s chair, shattering all previous records for such a vacancy. While pretty much every member of the House Republican caucus has been talking about the urgent need to seat a replacement, nobody seems to have any sort of plan for how to do that. We’ve been through two stages where members were telling reporters that they were “confident” the job would be filled in short order, once with Steve Scalise and another with Jim Jordan. Both efforts resulted in multiple failed votes, with the proposed nominees eventually giving up in disgust. The latest effort opened the doors to anyone who could be convinced to take the job. Rather than one leading candidate, we wound up with nine, at least until last night. Dan Meuser of Pennsylvania dropped out after failing to perform well in a secret ballot. But don’t worry… I’m sure this will be finished by tomorrow. Again. (NY Post)

House Republicans huddled behind closed doors Monday night as nine of their lawmakers pitched to the GOP conference on why they should be the next speaker.

The nearly three-hour-long meeting ended with one lawmaker, Rep. Dan Meuser (R-Pa.), dropping out of the race, but no clear front-runner emerging.

“We had some other great candidates. This is just about making the speaker’s office be as effective as possible,” Meuser said afterward.

Don’t feel too guilty if you’re not familiar with all of these candidates. And I say this with no disrespect intended for any of them. The list is composed of Tom Emmer of Minnesota, Mike Johnson of Louisiana, Jack Bergman of Michigan, Byron Donalds of Florida, Kevin Hern of Oklahoma, Gary Palmer of Alabama, Austin Scott of Georgia, and Pete Sessions of Texas. We’re not exactly talking about household names here with lengthy resumes in most cases. I had to Google a few of these men and I cover this stuff for a living. The only ones I was fairly familiar with were Pete Sessions, Byron Donalds, and Tom Emmer.

This is not how the selection of a Speaker has traditionally been handled. Usually the vote is a formality and the members know who will take the position before they enter the chamber. It’s typically someone with previous leadership experience, generally a conference chair, a Whip, or a minority or majority leader. But that was back in the old “normal” times. Having this many choices without any of them having a large, obvious constituency in the caucus doesn’t really sound like a recipe for a rapid success, but who knows? Maybe they will surprise us all.

And they certainly need to. There is even more at stake than the pending potential government shutdown, the aid packages being debated, and the ongoing House investigations. This chaos is an embarrassment to the entire party and it hands a powerful talking point to the Democrats heading into the presidential election cycle. You want to take back control of the entire government? You can’t even manage your own party.

If they can’t manage this, I’ll put forward and alternate suggestion. Go ask ChatGPT to generate a series of nine-digit numbers. Go down the list until you find one that matches the social security number of a living person and offer them the gavel. If they decline, keep going down the list until somebody says yes. (The Speaker doesn’t have to be a member. Anyone can be chosen for the job.) If they turn out to be too much of a disaster, you can simply vacate the chair again and continue down the list. How much worse could we do than what we have now, which is nothing and nobody? Get to work, people. Seriously.