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.

House Republicans want to pass their own individual budget bills (the 12 appropriations bills that make up the federal budget) and then they want the Democratic Senate and the Democratic president to somehow just shrug their shoulders and agree to it all. But there are a few obvious problems with fulfilling this desire, chief among them the fact that Democrats are just not going to do that, period. But let's set even that aside for the moment.

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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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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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House Republicans are meeting tonight to hear from all their candidates who have declared they are running for speaker. It'll be a closed-door meeting, where each of the candidates will make a presentation to the GOP House conference. And this could take awhile, since there are nine names now in the running.

The collapse of Jim Jordan's speaker bid at the end of last week set up this open race. None of the previous candidates is officially running (Kevin McCarthy, Steve Scalise, and Jordan), but all of them would probably accept the nomination, if no other consensus is reached. But for now, they're out of the running (and, honestly, any of them becoming the nominee again is pretty far-fetched at this point).

Here's who is in the running (in alphabetic order): Representatives Jack Bergman, Byron Donalds, Majority Whip Tom Emmer, Representatives Kevin Hern, Mike Johnson, Dan Meuser, Gary Palmer, Pete Sessions, and Austin Scott. You can be forgiven if you've never heard of any of them -- the only one I immediately recognized is Sessions (who has been around for a while).

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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?

Republicans who gain control of the House are always like the dog who actually caught the car he's been chasing, because they simply don't know what to do with it. They just don't. This GOP civil war has been simmering for decades now, between those who actually do understand the way Congress works and those who just want to burn it all down. Jordan was the ultimate "burn it down" guy, and he just failed badly in his bid to take over the whole House Republican caucus. So this ideological battle will continue to rage, one assumes, right up to the point where the public gets so disgusted by their antics and their general ineptitude that they hand control of the chamber back to the Democrats.

House Republicans are, in a word, ungovernable. They cannot even get their own act together, much less set a political agenda for the rest of the country. This entire three-week saga has been nothing short of proof that Republicans should not be let anywhere near the levers of political power in this country, since all they truly excel at is smashing the machinery in rage.

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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.

This does not bode especially well for Jordan. It really should be the death knell for his chances of leading the chamber. But we all saw Kevin McCarthy bludgeon his way to winning a vote after losing a whopping 14 times, so Jordan must somehow think the same could happen for him too. And Jordan's whole political persona is being a fighter -- he'll fight harder and stronger than anyone else, dammit! -- which makes the process of Jordan gracefully backing down look (to him and his supporters) like giving up and generally being a loser.

Watching from the sidelines, it feels like we are nearing some sort of resolution. It wouldn't surprise me if the Republicans came up with some sort of answer either just before the weekend or perhaps just after. We've already wasted most of three legislative weeks on this navel-gazing exercise, and frustrations are running high.

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Today marked the start of the third straight week without a speaker of the House of Representatives. Republicans are still bitterly divided, with no end in sight to the standoff. The full House met today for the first time since Kevin McCarthy was deposed, in order to hold a vote on whether Jim Jordan would become the next speaker or not. Jordan failed in this effort, as 20 of his fellow Republicans voted for someone else. And the word now is that they won't be meeting for another vote until tomorrow morning, which means that Jordan has been unsuccessful in convincing the holdouts, at least for now.

Last week, Steve Scalise avoided the public humiliation of losing a speaker vote by refusing to call one until he had lined up the necessary 217 votes to win it. Within a day's time, he realized he was never going to achieve this, so he took his name out of contention. This left Jordan as the next candidate in line, but applying heavy pressure over the weekend didn't work out the way he had intended it to. Jordan, unlike Scalise, thought that holding a public vote would convince enough Republicans to get behind him, but this appears to have backfired on him.

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Since today is kind of a waiting game in Washington, as pundits ponder whether Representative Jim Jordan can strongarm enough of his fellow House Republicans into voting for him for speaker or not (the vote will be held tomorrow), I thought it was a good day to check in with the state of the Republican presidential nomination race.

Or, to be strictly accurate, the race for second place on the Republican side. Donald Trump continues to absolutely dominate the field, as even his daily rolling average in national polling is approaching 60 percent. His closest competitor trails him by a whopping 45 points. That is not a race, that is a coronation. But operating on the principle of "Who knows what could happen?" it is still worth taking a look at how the others are doing, because there have been a few developments in the race for second.

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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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