Representative Ruben Gallego made some news today with his announcement that he is running for the 2024 Democratic nomination for a Senate seat in Arizona. If she were still a Democrat, this would be framed as Senator Kyrsten Sinema "drawing a challenger" or "being primaried" from within her own party, but since she became an Independent that is no longer true. With a Republican in the mix as well, there may wind up being a three-way contest for the seat. But then again, maybe not.

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Two years ago today, Joseph Robinette Biden Junior was sworn in as the nation's 46th president. So how is he doing at his job? His approval rating in public opinion polls has generally improved since the midterm elections, hitting numbers he hasn't seen in a year. But those numbers are still south of 45 percent (on average), which is fairly common for a first-term president but certainly nothing to brag about.

Biden has had some notable successes as president, and some notable rocky patches as well. He entered office as the COVID-19 vaccines were becoming widely and freely available, and things seemed rosy on this front for his first year, only to get a lot grimmer as the Omicron strain hit much harder than any of the previous variants of the virus. All of a sudden we weren't done with COVID-19 and life didn't return to normal as expected. But since then, the virus has become almost an afterthought and didn't matter much to voters in the midterms (even though it had been predicted that it would be a major issue).

Biden's legislative accomplishments are more impressive than any president since Lyndon B. Johnson. True, Biden did have a Democratic Senate and House to work with, but both of those had historically-slender majorities -- L.B.J., for instance, had as many as 68 Democratic senators to work with. Biden only had 50 -- including two who loved the media spotlight so much they didn't care if they torpedoed Biden's agenda in major ways. Biden also managed to pass some major bills with bipartisan support, which is almost miraculous, these days.

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Jerry Falwell must be spinning in his grave. For those that don't remember the era, in the 1980s, Falwell was at the forefront of the movement to instill his brand of Christianity into American politics, which at the time mostly meant influencing conservatives and Republicans. This was far enough back when "conservative" and "Republican" weren't as 100 percent interchangeable as they are today, I should point out. Falwell created his own group and called it the "Moral Majority" -- a name meant to highlight what he (obviously) believed was an amoral minority who had become too powerful in American politics. Moralism and being holier-than-thou were the watchwords of the day. Republicans would use all sorts of moral issues (today we'd call them "culture war" issues) as a big wedge to shame Democratic liberals and get more Republicans elected to office. This was long before the moralistic frenzy surrounding Bill Clinton -- that all came later. This is also what laid the groundwork for Republicans painting themselves as taking the moral high road while Democrats collapsed into degenerate "secular humanism." Those days, quite obviously, are gone. Because today's Republican Party is about as amoral as can be imagined -- far beyond the caricature of the godless liberals Falwell painted back in the day. Today's Republicans simply do not care one whit about morals -- any morals at all, it seems.

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With apologies to Frank Zappa, this week's big political story might be summed up as coming from "Joe's garage." But we'll get to all of that in a moment, down in the awards section (it shouldn't be any mystery which one he's going to get). First, though, let's take a look at the other momentous things that happened during the past week.

This column, of course, measures weeks from Friday afternoon to Friday afternoon. As we were writing last week, the House of Representatives was still deadlocked over who would become the next speaker. This continued far into the night, until Kevin McCarthy finally emerged victorious. Weakened, bloodied, diminished... but finally victorious.

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Attorney General Merrick Garland has now announced the appointment of a special counsel to look into President Joe Biden's apparent mishandling of classified documents. This bombshell hit the political world earlier today and everyone has been furiously reacting ever since. Personally, when we first heard the news (earlier in the week) that an organization that Biden created (after he left office as Barack Obama's vice president) had turned over classified documents to the National Archives, we took a "wait and see" approach to writing about it. Now that the other shoe has dropped in a dramatic way, though, it's time for some reactions.

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The 2024 campaign has begun. Not the big one -- not the race for president, that already started when Donald Trump threw his hat in the ring laughably early, in a naked attempt to avoid justice. Instead, this one is closer to home for me. Representative Katie Porter announced today that she is running for Dianne Feinstein's Senate seat. Which means California may get the first truly open Senate race since 1992 (when Feinstein first got elected). And since it's California, there is no real question of a Republican winning the seat, since they are all but irrelevant out here.

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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.

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To sum up today's proceedings in the House of Representatives, we turn to the esteemed and well-respected political thinkers Monty Python's Flying Circus:

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As the sun sinks slowly in the west... as the stormclouds continue to gather... welcome to another episode of As The House Turns....

Sorry if I'm a little loopy, but watching six consecutive roll-call votes in the House of Representatives has done that to me. The clown parade continues, with no real end in sight, although the Republicans have now introduced a twist to the story by only agreeing to adjourn the chamber for a few hours. They will reconvene at 8:00 tonight, which is odd -- I mean, do they really want this to be on primetime television? For what possible purpose? Self-flagellation? Straight-up masochism? But then trying to figure out Republican motivations at this point is no more than a fool's game, so we'll just have to see what happens.

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I knew that Kevin McCarthy would be weak, but I have to admit I didn't expect he'd prove to be this weak, this soon. As I write this, the third vote for speaker is in progress [note: while editing this, the House adjourned until noon tomorrow...]. McCarthy will lose this one, just like he lost the first two. So far, the votes have been functionally identical: 212 votes for Hakeem Jeffries (the Democratic leader), 203 votes for McCarthy, and 19 votes for other Republicans. On the first vote the "other" was split, but in the second round and (so far) the third, the GOP opposition has lined up behind Jim Jordan. Who actually voted for McCarthy. In other words, the three-ring GOP House of Representatives has opened with a clown parade.

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