Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez summed up the week better than anyone else, we thought, with her remark: "In chaos, anything is possible, especially in this era."

This is where we find ourselves on the fourth solid day of watching C-SPAN broadcasting what is normally a pretty sleepy affair: the vote to elect a new speaker of the House of Representatives. Normally, that is singular: "vote." We haven't had more than one vote in 100 years, in fact. But this week, we are already up to 13 votes, with the 14th scheduled (possibly, they could just adjourn again) for 10:00 Eastern time tonight. And nobody's sure if there is even an end in sight.

In other words, chaos currently reigns in the House. There is no speaker, there are technically no members (they aren't sworn in until a speaker is elected), and -- much to the delight of C-SPAN and all the journalists in the chamber -- there are no rules at all. The C-SPAN cameras are severely restricted during actual House proceedings, to only using one camera showing a very tight shot of the current person speaking. This condition was laid upon them when they were first allowed to bring television cameras into the chamber, for a very good reason: it avoids showing that when most members are giving speeches, the chamber is almost completely empty.

It wasn't empty this week. Everyone was there -- all 434 members (one seat is currently vacant due to a death). And they all were called upon to vote, over and over and over again. The House cannot do anything else until a speaker is elected. The only other possible motions are procedural (challenging whether there is a quorum, or a motion to adjourn, for example). And so 13 times, every name was called and every representative-elect answered back. It's been going on ever since noon on Tuesday.

At first, Kevin McCarthy lost some ground. He started with 19 of his fellow Republicans voting against him for speaker. Then it turned into 20. Then one other started voting "present." McCarthy's vote total shrunk from 203 to 200.

Today, McCarthy finally caused some movement in his direction. He currently has 214 votes, having successfully promised 15 of his colleagues the moon, the sun, and the stars to convince them to vote for him. But six remain in opposition, and they seem pretty intransigent. Some of them seem to absolutely hate McCarthy, in fact.

This is where we currently are. What happens next -- as soon as tonight, possibly -- could be one of three endgame scenarios: McCarthy convinces three of the holdouts to vote for him, McCarthy convinces at least five of the holdouts to vote "present" rather than voting for another person, or some combination of these two things (the math is a little tricky). Otherwise McCarthy will fail to win once again and they'll have to adjourn until some future date (which could even be tomorrow, but more likely sometime next week).

As we said, the math is a bit complicated. Unlike the Senate's filibuster rule, the number of votes McCarthy needs to win is not set in stone. If the House is complete, it has 435 members. Half of that is 217.5, so 218 votes are necessary to secure a majority. But the House currently has a vacant seat. And in the votes today, first three then two members were not present in the chamber. This left only 431 or 432 possible votes. Half of 431 is only 215.5, meaning McCarthy could have won that vote with only 216 votes. On the second vote, a Democrat returned (from surgery, apparently, scheduled for today) and 217 votes were necessary again. This means, in the simplest (mathematically, at least) scenario, McCarthy would need to flip three of the six votes currently against him. This would give him the 217 he needs to claim victory (assuming there are still two absences). [Mathematical footnote: If the two who were absent today return and vote for McCarthy, this changes the math further (then he'd have 216 of the 218 he needs and would only need to flip two of the holdouts), but we're just going to assume they don't make it in tonight.]

But members can vote "present" rather than voting for a person. If they do so then they are not included in the total (it's as if they were absent, in other words), which complicates it all even further. If some of the six dissenters started to vote "present" then it would change the magic number McCarthy needs for victory again -- but he'd need almost all of them to do so. If one of the six votes for Jim Jordan again (or anyone else), but then the other five vote "present," then that reduces the total "votes by surname" to only 427. Half of 427 is 213.5, meaning only 214 votes is needed. And McCarthy's already got 214 votes, so he'd become speaker without picking up any more actual votes.

The mix-and-match version would combine both people switching their votes and people voting "present." If McCarthy switched one holdout to vote for him, and three to vote "present," he'd win the speaker's gavel. If he switched two, then he'd only need one other "present" vote to win. So he does actually have numerous paths to victory.

McCarthy's main accomplishment today -- which kept his hopes alive -- is that he's now got more votes than the Democrat Hakeem Jeffries. Up until now, he hadn't, since all 212 Democrats have been completely united, in every single vote.

Of course, as we said, the six seem mighty rock-solid in their desire to deny McCarthy the speakership, and they are the most stubborn of the stubborn in the GOP caucus. If they completely dig in their heels, then McCarthy won't be able to win at all (barring the highly-improbable option of flipping a Democratic vote to his side).

This is what the Chaos Caucus has done. Welcome to the 118th Congress.

To put it into a binary framework, either McCarthy figures out a way to win, or (eventually) someone else will be elected speaker. But even if McCarthy does snatch victory from the slavering jaws of the lunatic fringe, he is going to start his tenure as the weakest speaker of the House in at least 100 years. And in 1923, it only took nine votes to select a speaker, so an argument can be made that McCarthy would be the weakest speaker since the 1850s.

Not only has he had to cave (his online detractors call him "Cave-in McCarthy") to every single demand the Chaos Caucus has made of him, the spectacle of sitting and losing time after time brings to mind either the classic schoolboy/frat-pledge being spanked with a paddle ("Thank you, Sir, may I have another?"), or (as we wrote yesterday) the "Being Hit On The Head Lessons" segment of the "Argument Clinic" sketch, from Monty Python's Flying Circus. In a word, this week has been downright humiliating for Kevin McCarthy. Which is not exactly the way you want to start a leadership job.

Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times summed up McCarthy's fate in a column titled (she explains it in the text): "Leopards Eat Kevin McCarthy's Face." Here are the best paragraphs:

Unable to corral his caucus for what is usually an easy vote, there is no chance [Kevin] McCarthy would be able to get them on board for hard ones, like keeping the government open or raising the debt ceiling to avoid plunging the country into default. His best-case scenario is that he'd be a fragile figurehead, a hostage to the hard right and constantly in danger of defenestration. And even that scenario looks increasingly out of reach.

. . .

The movement these characters are part of -- one McCarthy hoped would carry him to power -- isn't simply ideological. It's also a set of defiant, paranoid, anti-system attitudes, and a version of politics that prioritizes showboating over legislating. That's why McCarthy has found himself unable to negotiate with the holdouts. There are no real policy stakes, no concessions he can make on issues. The anti-McCarthy faction's demands are largely about power and visibility, and whenever he meets those demands, they move the goal posts.

. . .

One of the most amazing aspects of the House Republican crackup has been watching [Marjorie Taylor] Greene's angry exasperation as her shot at real power is imperiled by attention-seeking hard-liners. "They're proving to the country that they're just destructionists," she said on Sunday. It was the embodiment of the Twitter meme: "'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party."

. . .

McCarthy's Republican opponents are right in surmising that he believes in nothing and will yield under pressure; the evidence is his inability to stand up to them. His mistake was convincing himself that a party obsessed with dominance would reward submission.

We were surprised she was able to write that entire column without once dropping the name of Neville Chamberlain, personally. Because the word for what McCarthy has had to do to even get this far is indeed "appeasement."

The only Republican even remotely happy about this entire fiasco is George Santos. Finally, the media has stopped talking about him! Granted, nobody in Congress will talk to him, either, but at least the spotlight has moved on from his massive psychological mythomania to McCarthy's three-ring circus (although Michael Moore did have one parting zinger for Santos which managed to blend both stories into one funny joke).

Most of the rest of the internet (to say nothing of late-night television) was busy engaging in what one write-up of the fiasco called "MAGAfreude," which we had to admit we found amusing. The funniest we've seen yet was: "The Republicans can't even peacefully transfer power to themselves." Even Republicans have been admitting how bad this all looks for them, using their own colorful terms to do so. Meanwhile, Democrats are having all kinds of fun watching the Republican-on-Republican dogfight, some of whom tweeted out photos of themselves enjoying some popcorn. A Republican, during one of the myriad nominating speeches, even called the Democrats "the popcorn caucus."

Levity aside, though, this open warfare among Republicans has been a long time coming. The chickens are coming home to roost in a big way, and it didn't exactly happen overnight. You can trace it back to the Tea Party, or Newt Gingrich, or Sarah Palin, but the loud outspoken lunatic fringe of the Republican Party certainly didn't somehow spring into being when Donald Trump hijacked the party for his own aggrandizement. It's been there a long time, and it has been growing bolder and more unreasonable the entire time. This schism was always there, just waiting to explode all over the national stage.

And now it has, and now more than a few Republicans are bemoaning this sad state of affairs despite having contributed to it all in a major way. Here's just one example, from Karl Rove: "The fact that [the Chaos Caucus] are driven to nominate Byron Donalds, an unremarkable sophomore, is a sign of incompetence, stupidity and absurdness of all this. This is not a serious exercise. It is an infantile temper tantrum." And ol' Karl knows a thing or two about infantile temper tantrums (remember him absolutely refusing to believe that Barack Obama had defeated Mitt Romney in 2012?).

There's an old saying from the realm of fantasy literature about wizards and witches and other users of magic, about the practice of calling up demons and spirits and whatnot. H.P. Lovecraft wrote the original version: "Do not call up that which you cannot put down." It means don't give life to something (especially something evil) that is stronger than your own magical powers to contain it and/or control it, because that would obviously be a dangerous thing to do.

This is precisely the situation that Kevin McCarthy and all the non-Chaos Caucus Republicans now find themselves in. They have nurtured and fed and encouraged some very dark political fringes, and Donald Trump (and the power to raise small-donor money online outside of the party machinery) set them all free to do whatever they felt like to get their names and faces on television. Now they are reaping this whirlwind. The monster has broken loose, and even the monster's creator can't do much of anything about it.

This dynamic -- this power schism -- is not going to go away even after a speaker is eventually selected. The next thing the House will have to vote on is its own rules. That fight could be even more contentious than the speaker vote. And then on every issue the House is faced with, McCarthy will have to bend to the wishes of the most extreme elements in his caucus, making him no more than a titular leader at best. He could be ousted at any moment, and all it would take would be for McCarthy to lose some support of the rest of the Republicans for him to be gone. Just ask John Boehner -- he's been through it.

The lunatics are driving the bus. That is the real lesson of this week's Groundhog Day speaker's vote. When Republicans have held the House ever since the rise of the Tea Party, internal squabbling has gotten in the way of enacting pretty much any of the hard-right agenda, and we should expect nothing different from this bunch. Unfortunately for them, the Republican Party has called up that which it cannot now put down. And we're all going to pay the price for that for the next two years.

Think that's too demonic? Or too harsh in general? We don't. And we're not the only ones. We end today with a scathing commentary from an extended Politico article on the phenomenon, which used a different (but still pretty horrific) metaphor to describe this week:

Just two months ago, when Republicans underperformed historical trends in the midterm elections and a bunch of extremist candidates lost winnable races, the consensus view among many commentators was that American politics was at last "returning to normal."

Okay, then. Tuesday's drama surrounding the GOP's efforts to elect a speaker to lead its wafer-thin House majority is normal only in the sense that the past generation has made the politics of chaos, confusion and contempt come to seem normal.

By any historical standard, however, vivid evidence that one chamber of the national legislature is essentially ungovernable is a high-water moment. Kevin McCarthy, whatever the outcome of this contest in coming hours or days, can rest assured he has earned a legacy -- as a symbol of pathos and ineffectuality, an emblem of the cannibalistic spirit of the age.

We have two Honorable Mention awards before we get to the main one this week.

He hasn't had the chance to yet -- it won't happen until there's a speaker -- but one California newly-elected member of the House will be sworn in not on the traditional Bible or other religious text, but rather on a collection of items which have deep personal meaning for him: a copy of the United States Constitution, a photo of his parents (who both died during the pandemic), his naturalization papers which made him a U.S. citizen, and... a copy of Superman #1 from the Library of Congress.

That's right, a Superman comic (the very first!) will be used to swear in a member of Congress. Here is how Robert Garcia explained this unusual choice:

"I learned to read and write English reading comics as a kid. Never stopped reading," he said.

Garcia, who moved to the US from Peru, said that the values he grew up with while reading Superman are ones that he brings with him into his adult life and his new job.

"I grew up mostly reading Superman comics, you know, truth and justice, an immigrant that was different, was raised by good people that welcomed them and always someone that if you look at Superman values, and caucus values, it's about justice, it's about honesty, it's doing the right thing, standing up for people that need support."

That is not only a great story but it also proves something which we personally have always believed. All reading -- no matter what the medium, no matter what the subject matter -- is good. We do not look down on people who love to both write and read comic books or fanfic (sci-fi, horror, vampires, or what-have-you...) or bawdy doggerel or any of the other forms of writing usually looked down upon by reading snobs. It's all good! [Full disclosure: We have been known to heartily enjoy a good comic book ourselves, without the slightest shame whatsoever. So there!]

The second Honorable Mention goes to President Joe Biden, for his speech today both memorializing the second grim anniversary of the January 6th insurrection attempt as well as awarding Presidential Citizens Medals to some of the heroes among the police who fought to protect the U.S. Capitol (some of which were posthumous).

Biden began his speech by pointing out once again that "a violent mob of insurrectionists" tried to "usurp the peaceful transfer of power" and laid the blame for it all precisely where it should be: on Donald Trump's Big Lie that the election had somehow been "stolen" or "rigged." He later referred to the mob as "sick insurrectionists" with their "god-awful sick threats" to democracy, and reminded the country of how badly politics can go wrong if good people don't stand up for what is right.

There were a few Biden stumbles in his speech (he mistakenly referred to "July the sixth" at one point...) but it was ironic indeed for him to be giving it precisely when the House was failing to transfer its own power. We wonder whether any of the cable news channels ran the two as a split-screen, in fact, because that would have been karmically appropriate.

But our Most Impressive Democrat Of The Week this week was none other than the new leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives, Hakeem Jeffries. How could we not consider him most impressive, when we heard his name spoken so often this week?

Sure, Jeffries was also impressive for holding the Democrats together just as successfully as Nancy Pelosi -- throughout every vote, every Democrat voted for Jeffries -- but it was the sheer repetitive nature of the voting that did it, for us.

Fourteen separate times this week, 212 Democrats were asked who they voted for and they all responded "Jeffries." Multiply that out and it is 2,968 times we heard Jeffries' name, just from his own members alone. When you add in the fact that the clerk repeated his name after each and every vote, and you get a whopping 5,936 times.

This isn't strictly accurate, since in at least one of the votes a Democrat was absent, but it also doesn't note the number of times his name was used by those nominating him or by the clerk for other reasons. So we're just going to round it up and say Hakeem Jeffries heard his own name on the House floor an astounding six thousand times this week.

If that's not impressive -- for an incoming party leader who is going to wind up minority leader and not speaker -- we just don't know what is. Ask any advertising industry worker, they'll tell you: repeating names works. It certainly worked on us, so we hereby use his name one more time to award Hakeem Jeffries this week's Most Impressive Democrat Of The Week.

[Congratulate House Minority Leader ("In Waiting") Hakeem Jeffries on his House contact page, to let him know you appreciate his efforts.]

In the spirit of Democratic unity shown by those in the House, we had no Most Disappointing Democrat Of The Week this week. We suppose we could review the last three or four weeks (since the last of these columns) and find somebody, but as you can see we didn't even try to review all the stuff that happened over the holidays anywhere else, so that would be kind of unfair. As a whole, Democrats pulled together this week, so the first MDDOTW award of 2023 is going to have to spend another week on the shelf.

If you disagree, as always, feel free to nominate someone in the comments.

Volume 689 (1/6/23)

We're going to keep it light, this week. Hey, it's the first week back after a long break, we all could use a few laughs, right?

Our first two talking points this week are just a little gratuitous mocking of Donald Trump, just for the sheer fun of it. The last five, however, are all funny tweets we've seen on the subject (more can be found either at HuffPost or the Washington Post, or just go to Twitter and look at the "SpeakerVote" hashtag (it's probably still trending) -- new ones are being posted constantly, and many are pretty amusing.

[Note: For technical and editorial reasons, we do not as a rule "embed" tweets, so these are just text versions, but we have provided the links to the original tweets for you to follow.]

   Bye, Felicia?

Funniest thing of all.

"Anybody else notice that Donald Trump is becoming increasingly irrelevant to the Republican Party? Throughout the whole week, Trump only halfheartedly intervened in the biggest dogfight in the Republican Party since he was president, giving lukewarm endorsements to Kevin McCarthy. Don't believe me? How about: 'Kevin McCarthy will do a good job, maybe even a great job'? Not exactly brimming with enthusiasm or confidence, that. Trump apparently called around to all the dissenters after the first day of McCarthy losing vote after vote, and told them all they should back down and go ahead and switch their vote. The next day zero of them followed his advice. Trump lost big in the midterm elections, and this week he saw even more of his influence in the Republican Party slip. Trump is still getting mentioned in the national media, but it's in articles whose headlines contain the phrases 'Trump's Spell Over GOP Breaks,' and 'Trump's Worst Fear Is Becoming True: He's Being Ignored.' After all, if even the ultra-MAGA folks in Congress now feel free to ignore Trump, how strong can his hold still be?"

   Boebert goes there!

There was even some public pushback from one of them!

"Lauren Boebert, who is about as Trump-loving as a Republican House member can get, even openly defied and contradicted her Dear Leader in a speech on the House floor this week. Here's what she had to say:"

Let's stop with the campaign smears and tactics to get people to turn against us -- even having my favorite president call us and tell us to knock this off. I think it actually needs to be reversed and the [former] president needs to tell Kevin McCarthy you do not have the votes and it's time to withdraw.

"Trump didn't take her advice, of course, since he never takes anyone's advice -- but it certainly was a surprise to hear an ultra-MAGA Republican publicly tell Trump that he was wrong and she was right. It really was an Emperor's New Clothes moment!"

   Best season ever!

OK, on to the tweets. From Jon Stewart:

This is the best season of cspan...ever.

   Peak obstruction

From Mr. Muckety Muck:

Republicans have finally reached peak obstruction. They're obstructing themselves.

   Halley's Comet

From A chick named Sam

Well one thing we've learned from watching Kevin McCarthy grovel for the gavel, he's the type of loser that comes around once in 160 years. He's the Halley's comet of losers.

   Almost enough

From Shay Veno:

Careful! Another vote or so and Matt Gaetz will fly the whole House across state lines and try to have sex with it.

   Who dis?

And finally, a bit of dialog (with amusing photo) from itsallrealitv, "in between Round 13 and Round 14...":

Phone: Ring Ring

Nancy Pelosi: Hello?

Kevin McCarthy: Nancy, it's Kevin

Nancy: Kevin who.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant