Today, Republicans crossed the Jordan. That would be Jim Jordan, and enough of them crossed him in a third House speaker vote that the party as a whole has now completely crossed him off the list. Jordan is no longer the Republican "speaker-designee," instead he's just "Representative Jordan" again. And yet the Republicans are still nowhere near their Promised Land (to complete that metaphor) -- they're still out there somewhere, wandering in the wilderness.

Where do House Republicans go next? They don't have a clue. They'll think about it over the weekend and then get back together Monday night to hold another closed-door meeting to nominate another poor sap to try to become speaker. Maybe it'll be one of the previous selections? Kevin McCarthy or Steve Scalise certainly don't seem far-fetched, at least at this point. But it could be someone new as well. Lots of people could run, who knows?

Republicans who gain control of the House are always like the dog who actually caught the car he's been chasing, because they simply don't know what to do with it. They just don't. This GOP civil war has been simmering for decades now, between those who actually do understand the way Congress works and those who just want to burn it all down. Jordan was the ultimate "burn it down" guy, and he just failed badly in his bid to take over the whole House Republican caucus. So this ideological battle will continue to rage, one assumes, right up to the point where the public gets so disgusted by their antics and their general ineptitude that they hand control of the chamber back to the Democrats.

House Republicans are, in a word, ungovernable. They cannot even get their own act together, much less set a political agenda for the rest of the country. This entire three-week saga has been nothing short of proof that Republicans should not be let anywhere near the levers of political power in this country, since all they truly excel at is smashing the machinery in rage.

Jordan has always been machine-smashing rage personified. John Boehner once called him a "legislative terrorist," which seems pretty appropriate. But this week saw what some are calling the "revenge of the squishes." Squishes, in Republican parlance, are GOP members who keep trying to fight the worst impulses of their own party by pointing out how unreasonable they are. But in the end, the squishes usually knuckle under and vote the party line -- which is exactly what Jordan assumed they'd do in his case. But this time they stood firm even with a rightwing-media-fanned effort to terrorize and intimidate both them and their immediate families. This merely deepened their resolve, to the point where they were essentially telling Jordan to his face: "You can't bargain with us. There is nothing you can offer us to change our minds. We just don't like you, Jim." Today, after the third vote, the squishes nailed Jordan's scalp to their wall, instead of the other way around (as Jordan had expected).

Here's the best commentary on the week that we have personally read, written yesterday before Jordan's third failed vote:

After Jim Jordan's second failed attempt to become speaker of the House, Rep. Mike Garcia, a swing-district Republican from California, stepped off the House floor and into the 19th century.

"Clearly, what we're doing right now is not working," he told a few of us reporters on Wednesday as he exited the Speaker's Lobby. "So we've got to get a different approach here."

Such as?

"It sounds silly, but let's go to Gettysburg or something," Garcia proposed, "so that the Republican Party can once again remember why we do what we do."

Not silly at all! What better way for feuding Republicans to hone tactics for their party's civil war than to go to the site of the bloodiest battle of the real Civil War? They could spend a pleasant day celebrating their ineffectiveness by reenacting Pickett's Charge.

. . .

Garcia proposed that his colleagues could instead "do an off-site" nearby, either at Manassas or "somewhere else." I suggest they head down I-95 to a Civil War site whose name perfectly matches the Republicans' current situation: The Battle of the Wilderness.

Almost a year ago, voters entrusted Republicans with control of the House. And this is what they have done with it:

Fifteen rounds of voting to choose a speaker in January. Nine months of lurching between crises and failed votes on the House floor. A march to impeach President Biden on fabricated charges. The ouster of the speaker. A successful coup to topple the man Republicans nominated to replace the ousted speaker. Two failed speaker votes (and counting) on the House floor for the man who led the coup. Seventeen days (and counting) without a functioning House of Representatives at a time of two wars and a looming government shutdown. And no solution in sight.

Now, of course, we're up to three failed speaker votes for the man who led the coup, as well as his eventual comeuppance. And eighteen days (and counting) without a functioning House. And a situation even more chaotic than yesterday, putting any possible solution far over the horizon.

We'll try to summarize the week that was in similar terse fashion: on Tuesday, Jim Jordan lost his first vote for speaker by a vote of:

212 -- Hakeem Jeffries

200 -- Jim Jordan

20 -- other Republicans

Rather than voting again immediately (as Kevin McCarthy made them do in January), the House recessed for the day. Jordan called a second vote for Wednesday, which turned out worse for him:

212 -- Jeffries

199 -- Jordan

22 -- other Republicans

Jordan then scheduled a third vote for Thursday morning. But Thursday dawned and Jordan flip-flopped. He was now backing a plan to give Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry expanded powers for a limited time (so the work of the House could continue while Republicans held their circular firing squad within their own ranks). The GOP conference met and tensions were reportedly running high:

Tensions flared at a House GOP meeting after Jordan's decision. Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., "screamed" at Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., who led the push to oust him, to sit down when the Florida congressman went to the microphone to speak, according to Axios reporter Juliegrace Brufke. Rep. Michael Bost, R-Ill., was "almost lunging" at Gaetz, sources told Brufke.

The backers of Jordan vociferously rejected the leadership of the man they were backing to lead them, and shot down the plan. So Jordan emerged from the meeting and...um... flop-flipped?... back to his earlier position by announcing he was still running and there would indeed be a third vote, scheduled for this morning.

Jordan spent yesterday meeting with the holdouts. To no avail. There is nothing in particular they are looking for from Jordan, except that he, y'know... not be the next speaker. No minds were changed.

The third vote again got worse for Jordan:

210 -- Jeffries

194 -- Jordan

25 -- other Republicans

He kept moving backwards, and the word was he'd fall behind even more should he be foolish enough to call for a fourth vote. Members of the original eight Republican hotheads who managed to depose McCarthy then made an odd offer: they'd accept punishment -- from censure up to being kicked out of the Republican conference and off their committees -- if the holdouts would just relent and vote for Jordan. This didn't impress anybody. It certainly didn't change anyone's mind.

The GOP conference met again, and Jordan finally gave up. He lost the secret-ballot vote for whether he should continue by 112 to 86. Which leaves us precisely where we were on October 3rd, with no sitting speaker and no official Republican candidate for the job. We have wasted an entire three weeks on junior-high-school levels of melodrama.

Just like a dog who chases cars and eventually catches one, in other words.

One rather amusing footnote to all of this was the fact that by this afternoon, when the GOP conference met to vote on Jordan's fate behind closed doors, the Republicans piped in white noise to the hallway outside. Assumably, this was to cover the sounds of any loud and/or violent altercations within. Because this is the state of the current Republican Party, at least in the House of Representatives.

The Republican squishes certainly deserve our praise and thanks for their firm stand through all of this. They have saved America from the horrifying spectacle of Jim Jordan being speaker of the House. If you have no idea what this would have meant, just watch a video of pretty much any committee hearing with Jordan speaking in it. You won't be able to stand much of it, that's our guess.

So next week the Republicans start all over again. They'll nominate someone, and that person will either be acceptable to both the squishes and the hotheads, or they too will fail to become speaker. But unless the underlying problems are fixed when the next speaker is elected, this entire clown show could happen all over again within a month.

The new speaker will have to deal with a reality that everyone in the hotheaded Chaos Caucus refuses to acknowledge: Democrats hold the Senate. Democrats hold the White House. No partisan Republican Fantasyland budget is ever going to appear on President Joe Biden's desk, period. Compromises are going to have to be struck. And then voted on, likely with bipartisan majorities passing them.

All of that is precisely what led up to Kevin McCarthy getting booted from the speaker's chair. And all of that is precisely what is going to have to happen in roughly one month's time. Unless the power of one hothead to dethrone their House speaker is defanged, it's all pretty much guaranteed.

In other chaotic Republican news, things aren't looking especially good for some of the candidates running to challenge Donald Trump for the party's presidential nomination. The campaign of Mike Pence is floundering and bleeding money. Ron DeSantis is cutting back on the money his campaign is spending. Tim Scott is cancelling television ads, again due to lack of money.

Trump himself is much more consumed by his legal problems than his actual campaign, however. Down in Georgia, first Sidney Powell then Kenneth Chesebro decided it was smarter to take the plea deal the prosecution was offering rather than go to trial. Both had demanded speedy trials, and jury selection was scheduled to begin today. But both flipped before it even got started. Neither will spend a day in jail. But both will have to testify fully and truthfully against any and all of their co-defendants -- including Trump. This is, obviously, some pretty bad news for Trump's legal team.

A judge in the January 6th case against Trump issued a very limited gag order warning Trump not to publicly threaten court personnel or anyone involved with the case. By week's end Trump had already violated the order and was slapped with a $5,000 fine. We expect this to only be the first of such penalties Trump will be paying, since for the life of him he just can't shut up when he really should.

Trump thought he was going to personally face Michael Cohen in the ongoing business fraud case against him in New York, but Cohen rescheduled due to medical problems, leaving Trump to show up only to fume at all the people testifying what a gigantic liar he is.

Oh, and some sort of Trump fangirl was arrested and removed from the courtroom while Trump was there, after approaching him. She was apparently a court employee of some sort, although details are still rather sketchy.

We do admit that it was hard to concentrate on anything happening in the world of politics other than the center ring of the Republican circus in the House. And (oh, joy!) it looks like we're going to be just as distracted by all the House chaos next week as well -- which will be the fourth calendar week the Republicans will have devoted to proving to the world why they are incapable of governing. Because that's the type of month October has been.

Before we get to the main award, we have to give an Honorable Mention to Senator Laphonza Butler of California. Butler was appointed to take over the Senate seat left vacant by the death of Dianne Feinstein, but it was an open question whether she'd run for a full term or not next year. Governor Gavin Newsom originally talked about such an appointment as being a temporary, caretaker senator -- one who wouldn't run again, in other words. But when he announced Butler's appointment, he pointed out that he had not, in fact, asked for any such promise from her -- that the decision would be hers and hers alone. This week, Butler announced she wouldn't run for the seat, which will avoid possibly upending what is already a closely-fought race between three popular Democrats.

But the Most Impressive Democrat Of The Week this week is once again President Joe Biden. Biden did an admiral job this week of threading the needle between standing with Israel after it was viciously attacked by Hamas, but also showing support for the people living in Gaza on humanitarian grounds. This is a very tricky needle to thread, of course, but Biden handled it about as well as can be expected. He cautioned the Israelis of acting through sheer rage, and actually admitted America "made mistakes" in that regard after 9/11.

Biden became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Israel while it is at war. This also marks the second war zone Biden has visited, after his surprise visit to Ukraine a while back. This all may help to focus the public on one of Biden's strengths: handling foreign policy. After returning to America, Biden scheduled a brief primetime Oval Office address to the nation last night, where he made the plea for Congress to pass funding for both Israel and Ukraine. He tried to tie the two together as being victims of brutal neighbors who want to destroy a democratic nation. To our ears, this was a bit choppy (the rhetorical juxtaposition of the two conflicts), but we have to admit Biden made a pretty good case for the funding.

Joe Biden is a statesman. He spent eight years as vice president travelling around the globe meeting foreign leaders, and many years before that doing the same thing as a senator. A steady hand on the American tiller in times of conflict is a valuable thing to have in a president (especially when you consider the alternative -- how Trump would have handled either one of these crises).

Joe Biden had a good week. He was sober and constrained and he said a lot of things that needed to be said. He looked presidential, throughout it all. Which is why we are giving him another Most Impressive Democrat Of The Week award.

[Congratulate President Joe Biden on his official contact page, to let him know you appreciate his efforts.]

Nobody did anything incredibly depressing this week, so we only have a rather backwards-looking award to hand out this week.

Dennis Kucinich has finally come back to his senses, it seems. Or just gotten worried whether he was going to get paid or not, perhaps. It's hard to tell, but he wound up doing the right thing. But we're still going to hand him another Most Disappointing Democrat Of The Week award on his way back into political obscurity, for taking the job in the first place.

After Robert F. Kennedy Junior announced he was pulling out of the Democratic presidential primary race and would instead be making an independent run for the presidency, Dennis Kucinich announced he was stepping down as Kennedy's campaign manager.

Which was the right thing to do, as we said. But never taking the job in the first place would have been a lot better. So for his tenure leading the campaign of a man shamelessly trying to trade on his famous name while spouting all sorts of dangerous nonsense and conspiracy theories, Dennis Kucinich still qualifies as this week's Most Disappointing Democrat Of The Week.

[Dennis Kucinich is once again merely a private citizen, and it is our blanket policy never to provide contact information for people who have exited politics.]

Volume 727 (10/20/23)

Most of these are on the theme of Republican chaos this week (for good reason), but we threw a few taunts at Trump in at the end, just for fun.

   Unfair to clowns

A point worth making.

"I've heard the House Republicans described as a clown car or a clown show. But I feel this is unfair to clowns, since what we saw over the past week or so was much worse. The Republican Party seems to have descended fully into the depths of brute thuggery. If anyone disagrees with the most radical members, they are targeted for abuse from the MAGA hordes out there. Sooner or later this is going to lead to someone getting killed -- death threats are no joke. And no member of Congress should have to put up with having their lives or their families lives threatened anonymously merely for doing their job. Especially when those threats are almost outright encouraged by the most extremist Republicans. This is a serious degradation of what democracy is supposed to be, so no, I can't call what we just witnessed a 'clown show,' because it's far, far worse -- and it's unfair to hardworking clowns."

   The squishes held firm

We really do owe them all our thanks.

"There's a group of Republicans who have been given a derogatory name from members of their own caucus -- the so-called 'squishes'. They are routinely derided for always breaking down and abandoning their principles when it comes time to vote. But this week, we saw the revenge of the squishes, as they held firm against the idea that Jim Jordan was qualified in any way to be speaker of the House. In fact, almost anyone within the Republican conference would be better than Jordan. Other than his small band of fellow hotheads, any other Republican would be much more successful leading the House than Jordan could ever be. He's a bomb-thrower and all he knows how to do is lob grenades. Even when faced with threats and intimidation, though, the squishes bravely made their stand against the frightening lunacy of making Jim Jordan speaker."

   A fighter? Hardly...

This is a testament to Jim Jordan's character that really should have gotten a lot more media attention this week. When Elise Stefanik nominated Jim Jordan for speaker earlier this week, she made a glowing reference to how he was a "fighter" -- a reference to his time on the "wrestling mat." Will Knight, who was one of the Ohio State wrestlers who was sexually abused by the school doctor while Jim Jordan knew about it and looked the other way, had the most poignant reaction possible:

The funny thing is that when people always call Jim Jordan a fighter, and I always wonder who he's fighting for. Because he had a real opportunity to fight for us and the people that he coached and the people that he recruited at the Ohio State. And all he's done is turn his back on us, so I don't know what the fighter thing is. I know he used to be a fighter, I know he used to be a good wrestler, but he's not a good fighter for anyone else that I know of.

   Yeah. Right. Sure.

Some Republicans are desperately trying to pin the whole blame for deposing Kevin McCarthy on the Democrats (because of course they are). Their argument is that "only eight" Republicans voted to boot McCarthy but "one hundred percent" of Democrats voted against him. "Ninety-six percent of the votes against McCarthy were from Democrats" is another way they put it. So counter this with the uproarious laughter it truly deserves:

"Excuse me? Did you just say it was Democrats' fault McCarthy got the boot? Oh, my... give me a minute... I gotta stop this urge to burst out laughing.... OK, see, here's a quick quiz for you: If, a few years back, you had been in the House and eight progressive Democrats voted to oust Speaker Nancy Pelosi, how many Republicans do you think would have voted to save her? Would you have voted to keep Pelosi as speaker? The only possible answers to those questions that anyone with two brain cells to rub together would believe are: "zero," and "no, you would not have voted to save Pelosi." So please, go spread some of that manure out on the back forty where it belongs, because it's really stinking up the place here."

   Extreme chaos

The messaging on the whole fiasco is pathetically easy for Democrats.

"Democrats are the party of law and order -- with a heavy emphasis on order. We try to get things done, not prevent everything from getting done. We are the adults in the room, not the petulant little children flinging their own toys at each other. We are united behind our leadership, instead of having a full blown civil war on public display. We are disgusted at our Republican colleagues who have now wasted three full weeks while a government shutdown looms in the middle of next month. When American voters go to their polling places next November, we will be reminding them that Republicans stand for the most extreme of their members leading them into chaos. Republicans can't get their act together. So why should voters reward them with control of the House again when all they know how to do is break things?"

   Three down...

This one is just a pure taunt, we fully admit.

"I see that Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro have now both now entered guilty pleas in Georgia. They both decided to do so in the week right before their impending trial. Both of these lawyers were heavily involved in Donald Trump's efforts to steal the 2020 presidential election. Both of them will now have to testify truthfully against him when Trump goes to trial. This makes a total of three of Trump's 18 co-defendants who have now flipped and turned state's evidence, but my guess is they won't be the last to do so. Or, to put it another way -- 3 down, 15 to go."

   Is Rudy next?

Once you stick the rhetorical knife in, feel free to twist it.

"Two lawyers who worked with Trump on his election-stealing scheme are now convicted criminals. They got fairly light sentences, with no jail time. This might start looking pretty attractive to the other lawyers charged in this case -- the people who were closest to Trump and will have lots of first-hand evidence to give in his trial. And there's one obvious candidate for the next to flip, because he's so broke he can't even pay his own lawyers. So my money's on Rudy Giuliani being the next one to flip -- and Rudy was absolutely at the center of the whole election-stealing plot. If Rudy flips, Trump is pretty much toast. So I'll be watching to see, because he's my best guess for who works out a sweet plea deal next."

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant