Following yesterday’s edition of the ongoing congressional version of the Ziegfeld Follies, I have made a difficult but likely long-overdue decision. I am officially announcing my availability to be the next Speaker of the House. Now, I know what many of you who are familiar with me might be thinking. I’m well into my sixties, my family has a history of dementia or cognitive impairment in our later years, I’ve clearly made some questionable decisions over the course of my life, and I’ve frequently been seen having a cocktail far too soon after lunch. If you’re suggesting that I would be better suited for the presidency at this point, I can’t really argue, but the position is currently filled. But since nobody else seems to want the job as Speaker, I may as well give it a whirl.

All kidding aside, in case you somehow missed it with all of the other news flying across your screens, we managed to set yet another record in the House of Representatives yesterday by burning through not one, but two candidates for the Speakership. In the morning, Tom Emmer of Minnesota had the “confidence” of many members that he would be taking the gavel in short order. That idea rapidly fell apart, particularly after Donald Trump weighed in against him. They burned through a couple of other choices including Byron Donalds of Florida before finally settling on Mike Johnson of Louisiana last night. But is this circus actually any closer to bringing down the final curtain? (NY Post)

For the second time in one day, House Republicans have named a speaker designate.

Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) is the latest Republican to be nominated for the House speakership in an increasingly chaotic race that saw the previous choice drop out just four hours after getting the nod.

The 51-year-old edged out Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) on the third ballot of a closed-door conference vote Tuesday night, with 128 members pledging their support to the vice chairman of the House Republican conference.

The apparently endless voting will resume today. And for all I know, perhaps this will be the magical moment. But it’s impossible to ignore the final vote that thrust Johnson into the current lead. He received 128 votes, with the rest scattered among several other members, including more than forty who once again voted for former Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Johnson would need 217 votes on the floor to actually become the Speaker. Nobody seems entirely sure how that would happen.

The dysfunction has reached the point where even the Washington Post is suggesting that perhaps the Democrats should step in and help the GOP elect a Speaker rather than continuing to vote for Hakeem Jeffries. Of course, they would back the most pliable RINO they could identify in the Republican caucus, so that could potentially wind up being worse than having no Speaker at all.

To be clear, I’m not trashing Mike Johnson here. It’s true that he’s only been in office since 2017, but he’s definitely a Christian conservative and nobody would mistake him for a RINO. He also seems to have managed to remain pretty much scandal-free over the course of his political career. But that “far right” image could still be a problem. We have so many “moderates” and RINOs in the House at the moment that some of them might see this Freedom Caucus member as being “too far to the right” and refuse to vote for him. Like all the others before him, he can’t afford to lose more than a handful of votes or we’ll be back to the drawing board yet again.

It would be easy to point the finger at the Freedom Caucus for this logjam, and they certainly bear a significant amount of responsibility. But there is an even larger group opposing them, including the more than forty who keep voting for Kevin McCarthy. It still sounds as if we have a full conference that dutifully marches out in front of the press every day expressing their “confidence” that this will all be over “imminently” and there will be a new Speaker so they can finally get back to work. But in the background, it still looks like we have two cats facing each other with their tails puffed up and neither one is willing to back down.

I wanted to suggest that we suspend the pay of all of the members of the House until they place a Speaker, but that plan has some glaringly obvious problems. First of all, it would require the House voting to cut their own pay. The odds of that are zero and they can’t hold a vote without a Speaker anyway. But even if they could and they did, so many of them are engaged in insider trading that they’re probably too well off to miss a few paychecks and it would only be their staffers who would suffer.