Well, That Was Fun(ny) While It Lasted

Late last night, while I was asleep, Kevin "The Incredible Shrinking Speaker" McCarthy was elected Speaker of the House.

Expect 2 years of chaos and incompetence:

Confident that he was about to win the speaker’s gavel after a torturous four-day stretch of defeats, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California sat grinning late Friday night in his chair on the House floor. Then his face dropped.

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The final hours of Mr. McCarthy’s ultimately triumphant struggle for the speakership featured back-room dealing with the hard right and arm-twisting out in the open; phone calls from Donald J. Trump, the twice-impeached former president, to try to win over holdouts; haggling over how the House would operate in the coming two years; and even a narrowly avoided physical altercation inside the chamber.

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“That was easy, huh?” Mr. McCarthy said after finally taking the gavel just after 1 a.m. “I never thought we’d get up here.”

Over the last century, the negotiating and deal-cutting that have paved the way for the ascendance of new House speakers have typically played out behind closed doors and far ahead of the actual election; no speaker designate had needed more than one ballot to be elected since 1923. Instead, on Friday, much of the charged 11th-hour negotiations was televised in real time for all to see.

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At around the same time, Representative Mike Rogers of Alabama, who is in line to become the next chairman of the Armed Services Committee, had to be physically restrained by another lawmaker who clapped his hand over Mr. Rogers’s open mouth after the irate congressman approached Mr. Gaetz.

“We haven’t seen this in a century,” said Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, Republican of Pennsylvania, referencing the last time a speaker election dragged out past nine ballots. “We’re in an emotional climate to begin with, absent this, before we got here. It’s emotions running high.”

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On the next ballot — the 15th and final — Mr. Gaetz and Ms. Boebert cast the same “present” votes, signaling they did not support Mr. McCarthy but reducing the number of votes he would need to win a majority. The last of the holdouts — Mr. Biggs, Mr. Rosendale, and Representatives Eli Crane of Arizona and Bob Good of Virginia — fell in line and also changed their votes to “present,” allowing Mr. McCarthy to become speaker.

“Matt really wanted to get everybody there,” Mr. McCarthy said of Mr. Gaetz during an informal news conference later in the night. “Through all of this people’s emotions go up and down, and at the end of the night, Matt got everybody there.”

Both Mr. McCarthy’s allies and the rebels have remained tight-lipped about what exactly prompted the last group of defectors to change their votes between the 14th and 15th ballots.

We'll find out soon enough.

It is pretty clear that we are going levels of dysfunction in this Congress that will make John Boehner's tenure as speaker look like a walk in the park.