Molly Jong-Fast writes:

Despite his best efforts, the leopards have finally come for Kevin McCarthy’s face. For those not extremely online, I’m referring to a 2015 tweet from YA novelist Adrian Bott: “‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.”

It’s nearly eight years later and McCarthy is learning this lesson the hard way, as his quixotic quest for the Speakership, which spanned most of that time, is falling apart on C-SPAN. Rumors of an affair (which McCarthy denied) might have derailed McCarthy from taking over the gavel from John Boehner in 2015. And again, in 2018, when McCarthy was set up to be Speaker, Republicans lost the House. Now finally, Republicans have a razor-thin majority, but their party is too dysfunctional to govern. McCarthy is finding it impossible to stop a brakeless freight train driven by morons, making a mess of the 118th Congress before members are even sworn in.

How Republicans in Congress unraveled isn’t a mystery. There’s a straight line from Newt Gingrich to the Tea Party to Donald Trump to a Colorado congresswoman named Lauren Boebert saying she wants a “single-member motion to vacate.” Such a motion would mean that any member of the House, at any time, could call a new Speaker election. In other words: The Speakership would be held hostage by whichever congressperson was feeling craziest that day. McCarthy has already agreed to a five-member threshold for a motion to vacate, which means that five members can get together and throw sand in the gears whenever they want. Not exactly a recipe for legislative success. [Continue reading…]