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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Mike Pence surprised everyone this weekend, when he abruptly announced he was ending his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination during a speech Pence gave in Las Vegas. The surprise wasn't that Pence's presidential ambitions were doomed -- anyone with half a brain could see that from the get-go -- but that Pence had actually realized it himself, this early in the process. Personally, I knew from the day he announced that Mike Pence was never going to win the Republican nomination -- not even if Donald Trump had suddenly decided not to run. Even without Trump in the race, Pence would still have been doomed. His flavor of Republicanism is a thing of the past, he has an incredibly bland and smarmy personality (he really deserves to have Trump hit him for being "sanctimonious," much more than Ron DeSantis), and he enraged the MAGA crowd by not following the Dear Leader's order to somehow wave a magic wand and overturn the results of the 2020 election on January 6th. Add all of that up and it equals a big defeat from the Republican voting base, plain and simple. So watching the coverage of the development on yesterday's morning political-chatfest shows wasn't any real surprise (other than the early timing of it). What was a surprise (for me, at least) this Sunday morning was to see Arnold Schwarzenegger being interviewed (for some unfathomable reason) on NBC's Meet The Press.

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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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The breaking political news today is that we finally (!) have a new speaker of the House. However, I have been so immersed in this story for the past three weeks that I'm going to take this opportunity to step back from the House GOP drama club for a day and focus on another story that's also been developing quickly. We'll all have plenty of time to discuss newly-sworn-in Speaker Mike Johnson in the days and weeks to come, after all.

While all of this has been playing out in Washington, Donald Trump has been sinking slowly into his various legal quagmires. The most prominent example comes from Georgia, where a total of four of his co-defendants have now turned state's evidence, accepted rather lenient plea deals, and pleaded guilty to various charges. This leaves 14 co-defendants who have not flipped yet -- but still could. That's a lot of other shoes that could drop, obviously (and some of them are very big shoes indeed).

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Personally, we could not think of a better day to elect the next speaker of the House, it being Friday the 13th and all. But the way things are going, that doesn't exactly seem like it's going to happen. As we all sit and watch the center ring of the Republican circus, just when you thought that tiny little clown car couldn't possibly have any more clowns in it... another one emerges!

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Representative and current Majority Leader Steve Scalise has won his party's nomination for the job of speaker of the House of Representatives. He won a secret ballot held within his own caucus by the not-very-impressive margin of 113-99. But instead of the entire House immediately convening to hold a vote for the speaker's chair, they instead immediately went into recess. Nobody knows when such a vote will be held, meaning the chaos will continue for the time being.

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Republicans in the House of Representatives remain in disarray. That's probably not too surprising to anyone, since dysfunction is kind of their "brand" these days. But after the past few days, this is a lot more concerning to a lot more people. We should know, within the next two days or so, whether this is going to be a major impediment to American government or just another bump in the GOP's rocky road.

What has made it all more real is a new war raging in Israel. All of a sudden the fact that one house of Congress is paralyzed isn't a matter of: "Oh, just don't visit the National Parks during the shutdown, everything else will be fine," but rather of not being able to provide American military aid when it is needed. The consequences are far more dire, obviously.

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Robert F. Kennedy Junior announced today that he is dropping out of the Democratic Party's primary race and will instead mount an independent bid for the White House. Both Republicans and Democrats are already worrying over how this will affect the race next year, since third-party bids can often act as spoilers. But next year, depending on what state you live in, you may have not just three but instead four, five, or perhaps even more names on the presidential ballot.

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We've finally gotten to the point where even the headline-writers in the mainstream media had to admit the reality -- which runs 180 degrees counter to their propensity to magnify every little squabble among Democrats -- and finally write a few: "Republicans In Disarray" headlines. Because this was the week it became unavoidable. The Republican civil war broke out into the open in a big way, as they made history by deposing a speaker of the House of Representatives for the first time ever. From this point forward, we will be referring to just Representative Kevin McCarthy, since that's all he now is. And maybe not even that, if the rumors he's thinking about stepping down entirely turn out to be true.

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