It's In Their Nature to Eat Each Other.

 

 (By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)

It's finally hammer time for Kevin.

     Kevin McCarthy (R-Trump's Lap) finally got elected Speaker of the House on the 15th ballot. Nothing even remotely like this debacle had been seen before since 1859. Let's play the dream music as we take a trip down Memory Lane. What else happened in 1859?

 

   The Capitol building was still being erected, the US Senate had not yet moved into its new and present chamber, the Civil War was still two years away, John Brown hadn't yet attacked the armory at Harper's Ferry and, fittingly, Charles Darwin had published his On the Origin of Species.

    It's also the year freshman Congressman William Pennington of New Jersey needed an eye-popping 44 ballots over a period of two months before getting elected Speaker. Pennington, as McCarthy is expected to be, was one of the most ineffectual Speakers in US history and never won another term to Congress and died less than three years later.

    Pennington is best-known for being a very rare freshman congressman to be elected Speaker and also for forming a Gang of 33 that was tasked with advancing measures and legislation intended to forestall a civil war, a high-minded intention that, obviously, failed miserably. By the time Pennington died in 1862, the Civil War was just getting into full swing.

   It's almost impossible to imagine the bitterness and division that was rife in Congress when Pennington was Speaker but what we'd seen over the last four days was pretty close. Back in the 1850s, the dominant issue was slavery and whether to extend slavery rights to incoming states such as Kansas and Nebraska. Of course, the divisions had been sowed long before then when the odious Fugitive Slave Act was signed into law in 1850, another compromise that, along with four other bills, was intended to forestall the possibility of civil war.

    Obviously, they failed, too. All the Fugitive Slave Act did was alienate the progressive northern states such as New York and Massachusetts from the federal government and only temporarily placated the southern states that would become the confederacy. By the time Lincoln was elected in 1860, not a lot of people were happy with Uncle Sam.

    So, the divisions in Congress reached its apotheosis in 1856 when Congressman Preston Brooks nearly killed Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner by beating him with his cane. It was the result of Sumner making a speech two days before in which he called Brooks' relative, Sen. Andrew Butler of South Carolina, a pimp for slavery.

     These days, Congress's divisions are not more or less neatly drawn along an invisible Mason Dixon line and well-defined ideological differences. Slavery was the reason Pennington needed 44 ballots before his improbable and ultimately ill-conceived election to the Speakership.

     So, while it's nearly impossible to imagine the physical vitriol that ran through Congress in the 1850s, we do have an incident last night that threatened to be a reprise of the Brooks-Sumner attack. That was when Mike Rogers got into a one-sided screaming match with Matt Gaetz after the failed 14th ballot. By this time it was obvious McCarthy was finally making some headway with the 21 rebellious Republicans after making some deals such as reducing the number of House members who can call for a vacate vote from five to one, raising the debt ceiling with offsetting spending cuts, the right to fuck McCarthy's wife on his dining room table, etc.

     Whatever deals McCarthy had made in the cloak room and elsewhere, it still didn't sway Matt Gaetz, whose "present" vote essentially forced a 15th round. By this time, Rogers had had it with Gaetz, and who the hell can blame him? But as well as advancing on him, he also told Gaetz he was "through". In a perfect synecdoche of his clueless attitude during these 15 ballots, at the moment when Rogers had to be gagged and restrained from attacking Gaetz, McCarthy was serenely walking down the aisle for quite a few steps before he realized what was going on behind him.

 

     Seemingly also oblivious to the chaos was Katie Porter, one of the reliable 212 Democratic votes for Hakeem Jeffries, who rode out the storm by reading a paperback. It was a borderline unsubtle move as the book Porter was reading was The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by blogger Mark Manson.

 

     But earlier on, during the 10th ballot, George Santos proved that racism is still baked into Congress's DNA by making the white power sign while he was voting for McCarthy. No doubt he'll lie about that, too, when he's finally pressed pressed on it.

    

    Elsewhere that evening, lest there should be , God forbid, any questions cast against his newfound white power ideology, Santos was seen canoodling with Congresswoman Jewish Space Lasers.

    So it seems the old divisions are still somewhat in evidence, right wingers are still prone to violence except now they're going after their own. We heard about things like this happening in the bunker in the last days of the Third Reich, Arrests ordered, field executions, etc.

     It's in their nature to eat each other because hatred for everything that deviates one micron from their razor-narrow world view is what keeps the Grand Old Party humming. This is why McCarthy will be one of the shortest-tenured Speakers in US history. He gave away the farm and essentially got nothing in return but much more tenuous job security. So keep making the popcorn, folks and keep those giant foam rubber fingers handy because the next two years are going to be the ending of Thelma and Louise on an endless loop.