Thursday open thread: And on the third day... nothing happened

Look. I knew this was going to be a shitshow. But I thought that, after a bit of an infliction of humiliation, the Nazis would click heels, salute, and vote for the spineless protoplasm in human form known as Kevin McCarthy for Speaker of the House of Representatives of the Congress of the United States, gloria in excelsis and hosannah in the highest, amen.

However, as I compose this post, there is still no Speaker of the House. Which means, really, there is no House. No one has been sworn in. Committees are idle. The business of government in that chamber of Congress has ground to a halt. Because the GOP rebels so far are hanging tough. McCarthy keeps having vote after vote, repeating an action which has brought him no profit, convinced that this time he will get the prize.

If the Democratic Party brain trust had spent two weeks subsisting on pizza and Mountain Dew, they could never have come up with an scenario which delineates just how unfit for governance the modern Republican Party is. Electing a Speaker when you have a majority is a pro forma affair. You have a leader, and that leader becomes Speaker.

But that's where the trouble comes in. 

McCarthy is "leader" in name only. He has no nous. He has no gravitas. He's a $20 hooker who will blow whoever he has to to keep that drug habit going. And his drug is this eternal quest for power, for a position that he hopes will fill that emptiness in his soul.

He called out Donald Trump for January 6th, and then went groveling back to him three days later. He will do anything to attain the title.

And he might attain it. Who knows? But he will have made so many concessions that he'll have no authority. His caucus will be riven by factionalism. The real Speaker will be Hakeem Jeffries, as he cobbles together coalitions for discharge petitions so that the country can keep functioning. In his quest for a power he in no way deserves, McCarthy is helping to grind the wheels of legislation to a halt.

That's just fine for the GOP insurgents. They don't want government to work. They weren't elected to make it function. See what Matt Gaetz said:

McCarthy can give the Taliban Twenty complete veto power, and it wouldn't be enough. Because he's weak, and they know it. They want to destroy him. And they have no positive plan to replace him with someone more to their liking. They want it all to burn down. This is as good an analysis as any:

These are nihilists. They see Joe Biden's government as illegitimate, stolen from its rightful possessor, Donald Trump. So why should they keep it going? It makes as much sense as anything.

So, like Estragon and Vladimir, we shall continue to wait for a Speaker. But the longer this drags out, the more for the good for us. It may produce results unthinkable even two months ago. A Speaker Hakeem Jeffries. Or a GOP Speaker owing his or her position to Democrats, with the concomitant pound of flesh the Democrats will extract.

The next episode of this farce is today at 12pm EST. Do tune in.