This week is going to be chock full of big political stories, including Donald Trump testifying in his fraud trial in New York today and the third Republican debate on Wednesday. But today I thought it was worth taking a look at the other big political story of the week, since tomorrow's elections have several interesting possibilities that could reverberate beyond the borders of the states where they are held. Three states in particular are going to be impactful, no matter what the outcomes may be: Mississippi, Virginia, and Ohio.

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Republicans are in disarray. Let's start with that this week, shall we?

This week in the Senate, Republicans spent five whole hours ripping into one of their own. A group of GOP senators tried to force the hand of Senator Tommy Tuberville over his petulant hold on fast-tracking all military promotions, but to no avail.

The House, meanwhile, voted for an Israel military aid bill that is going nowhere in the Senate because (among other reasons) Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is diametrically opposed to the strategy.

The House also took the time to vote down a censure of a Democrat that drew Marjorie Taylor Greene's wrath, but also voted to let George Santos keep his seat. On both votes, there were significant numbers of Republicans crossing the aisle to vote with the Democrats.

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Senator Tommy Tuberville has never worn a uniform (unless you count a football jersey). And yet he feels he knows the United States military better than those who are serving or have served. In particular, he feels that his blanket hold on military promotions is an acceptable political-theater tactic, no matter the impact on people's lives or on the readiness of our military. Last night, members of his own party publicly took him to task for his tantrum, but they didn't succeed in changing his mind. The next step would be for the Senate to vote to essentially ignore Tuberville's parliamentary tactic and get on with what used to be a routine and non-controversial duty of the Senate: approving high-level military promotions. But to achieve this would require 60 votes, meaning at least nine Republicans would have to vote to shut down Tuberville's obstructionism.

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Polling for the likeliest of general election matchups this far out -- almost exactly one year until people actually get to vote for president next November -- cannot be seen as definitive, but it also cannot be brushed aside as irrelevant (since it's pretty obvious at this point that both Joe Biden and Donald Trump are going to wind up winning the two major parties' nominations). But it won't actually be just a two-man contest, since there will be other names on the ballot, in what is likely to be enough states to make a big difference. Both Robert F. Kennedy Junior and Cornel West have announced they are going to be running as independents, and who knows who the Green Party or the nascent No Labels effort will decide to nominate? At the very least, there may be four names for voters to choose from. Perhaps even five or six.

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After three weeks of junior-high-school levels of adolescent slap-fighting, Republicans in the House of Representatives finally (!) chose a speaker. Was this largely due to fatigue at how tawdry the whole clown show was, or was it the fear that some moderate members were actually considering working with Democrats to come up with a solution? We'll never know, but we certainly are glad it's over. For now, that is. The rule on the "motion to vacate" hasn't changed, so while Speaker Mike Johnson seems to be enjoying something of a honeymoon period with even the furthest-right of his caucus, things could always go south for him, since all it would take would be five disgruntled Republicans to kick him out too. And disgruntled is what MAGA extremists do best, so we'll have to see whether this comes to pass or not in the weeks ahead.

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There are plenty of metaphors to choose from when describing what newly-anointed Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is now going to have to face: a Gordian knot, threading a needle, walking a tightrope, squaring a circle, and the ever-popular herding of cats. Whatever image you choose, it all boils down to a near-impossible task -- perhaps with one very narrow solution, perhaps not. That's what Johnson now faces, with his boisterous House Republicans. The past three weeks of clown show hasn't changed the basic dynamic of this situation.

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House Republicans, in a whirlwind of chaos today, first elected a nominee to be speaker and then refused to give him the support he would have needed -- so he dropped out. It was a head-snapping day for politics-watchers, that's for sure.

For those of you who weren't glued to the news feeds today, I will try to give a play-by-play rundown of what just transpired. The short answer is: Tom Emmer won the Republican nomination for speaker of the House on the last possible round of voting, only to withdraw his nomination four hours later after realizing there were around two dozen Republicans who would never vote for him on the House floor. Which leaves us right back where we were three weeks ago on October 4th -- a speakerless House and a Republican conference that has zero party unity and no acknowledged leadership whatsoever.

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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?

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We're all currently experiencing the punchline of an old political joke -- the one that says Republicans really should be honest in their campaign slogans, by running on: "Government doesn't work -- elect us and we'll prove it!" Here we are, living that proof.

The House of Representatives does not have an elected Republican leader. Republicans control a majority of the seats, but it is such a slim majority that any five of them deciding to throw a monkey wrench into the works paralyzes the entire party. At the beginning of this month, a giant monkey wrench was indeed thrown, as eight Republicans managed to dethrone their own speaker. Since that point, chaos has reigned in the House, and it doesn't seem like sanity is going to prevail any time soon.

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Once again, Jim Jordan's hopes of becoming speaker of the House of Representatives went down in flames today. In the final tally, Jordan flipped two Republicans from opposing him to supporting him and he also picked up a third vote from someone who was absent yesterday... but Jordan also lost four Republicans who flipped from supporting him to voting for someone else. Instead of 200 votes for Jordan and 20 Republican votes against, that adds up to 199 votes for Jordan and 22 GOP votes against. Or to put it more simply: Jordan is going backwards.

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