Who Dares to Be the Next Speaker of the Asylum?

So with the GOP House lunatics having successfully purged their own party's Speaker last week, who would even consider the self-immolation of taking on that hot seat?

For the most part, the Beltway media is seeing it as a two-person contest. Ben Jacobs over at the New York Intelligencer has the weigh-in reports (paywalled): 

Though it will decide who is second in line for the presidency, this week’s battle for the Speaker’s gavel among House Republicans won’t be like a normal election...

Instead, the competition for support among the 224 members of the House Republican conference will play out more like a student-government election. While the final vote on the House floor will take place in full public view like much of the political dysfunction on Capitol Hill has over the past year, the vote to pick the Republican standard-bearer will take place behind closed doors via secret ballot. The candidates are campaigning as much on personal ties as ideology and form coalitions based on far more idiosyncratic factors than the factionalism on display in Washington of late.

The process also will take place with real uncertainty over what the rules will be. Although rules of the House Republican Conference currently require the party’s nominee to be Speaker to receive a simple majority, they can always be changed by a two-thirds vote, and there is the likelihood that they will be changed in order to minimize the chance of a revolt like the one Kevin McCarthy faced in January when he needed 15 ballots to become Speaker.

Here’s an overview of top candidates Steve Scalise and Jim Jordan, their unique strengths and weaknesses — as well as the long-shot contenders should everything somehow go haywire.

The Louisiana Republican is a longtime member of House leadership. Scalise, a conservative from the white-flight suburbs of New Orleans, was first elected to be whip, the No. 3 position in the House majority, in 2014 after beating out then-Representative Peter Roskam of Illinois in a ferocious intraparty race. He has since risen to post of majority leader under McCarthy and is hoping to take the next step up the ladder.

...Scalise has since faced a new health challenge with a diagnosis of multiple myeloma, a blood cancer. Though he has been undergoing chemotherapy, Scalise has described his ailment as “very treatable” and no obstacle to a leadership bid...

Scalise will benefit from long-standing relationships across the Republican conference and his strong track record as a fundraiser. However, he does not have the best relationship with McCarthy and allies of the former Speaker have reportedly been making calls discouraging Republican members from backing Scalise...

...Infamously branded a “legislative terrorist” by then-Speaker John Boehner, Jordan was one of the ringleaders of the right-wing clique (which eventually became the Freedom Caucus) that constantly stymied Boehner in the nearly half-decade he held the Speaker’s gavel and eventually forced him to step down.

With Trump’s rise to power, Jordan has since transformed himself into a key ally of the former president and was rewarded with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in the days after the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Not only was the Ohio Republican a top defender of Trump around the Russia probe and the first impeachment; he has continued to do so since then overseeing a select committee on “the weaponization of government” and playing a key role in the impeachment inquiry recently opened against Joe Biden...

Prior to serving in Congress, Jordan was a champion wrestler in high school and college, a record that Trump emphasized in his late-night endorsement of the Ohio Republican on Thursday. This fact also comes with some baggage. While Jordan was the assistant coach of the Ohio State wrestling team, a team doctor was sexually abusing members of the team. Jordan has denied knowing of the abuse, while some of those on the team have said he knew...

Neither of major contenders should be viewed as sane or respectable options for the Speakership.

Jim Jordan in particular is a vile piece of work, a grandstanding bomb-thrower whose destructive actions in Congress tended to kneecap his own leadership in a mad pursuit of party purity (or his own rise to power at the expense of everyone else's). He shares a lot of behavior and self-righteousness hypocrisy of Newt Gingrich, but lacking the intelligence and the long-term planning. Jordan is impulsive and reckless, jumping into one manufactured scandal and staged attack on liberals without care to the facts or to the lives he ruins in the process. That Ohio State scandal can well blow wide open if he becomes Speaker and it becomes newsworthy - and enough victims raise a stink in the courts - to compel Jordan out of that office.

It doesn't help Jordan that he's a major player in the January 6th insurrection planning, and he can well be weeks away from a grand jury indictment for his role in that.

With Scalise you're getting a guy from the Southern Conservative brand, which is obsessed with re-establishing Jim Crow rules and ending every civil rights gain from the 1960s. Despite his apologies and disavowals, he's been routinely tied to the Klan and other White Supremacist organizations, and he would definitely push for Culture War objectives that would sink the Far Right rot deeper into our national soil.

That these are the two most prominent figures to challenge for the Speakership now that McCarthy has been cast aside - and considering that McCarthy is offering himself back up as though he's the only sane option in a chaotic moment (again) in spite of the rejection he just suffered - tells you how devoid of genuine leadership the House Republicans are at right now.

If there were any other Rational choices for the Speaker's job, I'm guessing that those candidates are rational enough to understand the job is a death trap. Whatever ambitions and desire for making the history books they may have, they have to see the reality that the current ease of making Motions to Vacate creates weakness for a Republican Speaker. The second that Speaker falls out of favor with a wingnut, WHAMMO they will depart from that seat and the caucus goes right back to choosing another sucker to take the job.

Even an extremist like Jordan will be vulnerable. He could well grant the Far Right / Freedom Caucus / Tea Party / MAGA factions everything they wish, but if they're still not satisfied one of them will Motion and then the vote of No Confidence will happen and that career will be toast. Jordan could well gain the ire of one of the Rational factions saying "to hell with it, I will risk the primarying" and see himself vacated by six to nine of those members voting against him like the wingnuts voted against McCarthy.

It might even be funny to watch. Jordan winning the Speakership, and then a week later he does something blatantly sexist / racist / stupid - or worse, makes an anti-Semitic remark concerning Israel especially given the circumstances - to where the GOP Congresscritters decide to Vacate him and make Jordan's tenure as Speaker shorter than that guy who died from tuberculosis.

It would only add to the chaos, however, if the House Republicans can't decide on a proper Speaker to lead government. Other than the reality that the House Republicans WANT THAT CHAOS because they want to force that government shutdown on Biden and the Dems and make everyone suffer so they can lie to voters about who's really responsible for this mess and lie their way to electoral victory in 2024.

The best option for America is that sanity prevails, that the Far Right agenda of making Congress into an insane asylum get overturned by a number of Rational Republicans bucking the party and caucusing with the Democrats to make Jeffries the Speaker of a plurality House.

But that will never happen. House Republicans are a group of cowards, willing to surrender their pride and responsibility to constituents to let the Far Right Irrational players drive the bus over those cliffs.

This will be a messy week of watching a bad actor get promoted to a high seat of office, and then a messy month of watching that bad actor press for a shutdown at the worst possible time as the world gets engulfed in the madness of war.