Let's begin with a good word for U.S. Rep. Steve Womack, Republican congressman from the 3rd District of Arkansas.
Remember that he voted for the $1.7 trillion spending bill a few days ago. Remember that he rejected the idea of deferring the matter so that the incoming Republican House majority could deal with it. Remember that he scoffed at the idea of any supposed policy effectiveness being achieved by a group that couldn't even pick a speaker of the House.
Now let's turn to Tuesday afternoon. Acting with typical clarity and command in her final assignment as speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Democrat Nancy Pelosi struck the gavel to declare formally the final adjournment of the 117th Congress.
She passed the gavel to the vast void that is contemporary American Republicanism.
As the new bosses of the new House, the Republicans were insufficiently functional to take it.
They could not choose a speaker. It was because of their infestation of destructive wingnuts who want to blow up the government. And it was because their front-runner, their minority leader and heir apparent, was a both-sides player who had been unable to secure from the wingnuts a second mortgage on his negotiable soul.
Thus it was the inevitable result of two big things:
• A party moved by resentment to the disruptive, destructive right during the Obama-hating Tea Party insurgence.
• A party then rendered futile when its mainstream leaders cowed before the Trumpian cult of personality that arose in the upheaval.
Kevin McCarthy's first mortgage went to Donald Trump. It happened a few days after a frightened and aghast McCarthy, then GOP House minority leader, scolded Trump privately and publicly for fomenting insurrection in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2001.
Moving past any concern about insurrection to concern for party and self, McCarthy high-tailed it to Mar-a-Lago to re-embrace Trump and his then-lingering--and still not-inconsiderable--command of the Republican Party, owing to poll numbers and fundraising muscle.
Then McCarthy went back to Washington to oversee a political action committee that lathered Trump-aided money on the more sane and reasonable Republican House candidates in primaries instead of the extreme variety, who generally are members of a so-called Freedom Caucus and tend to view McCarthy professionally as a swamp denizen and personally as a snake.
Not many of those moderates got nominated or elected, but a few dozen Freedom Caucus members returned because they represent arch-right districts that get their red meat from Fox and Newsmax and like their representatives extreme, resentful, disruptive and uncompromising.
Needing 218 votes to become speaker, McCarthy found himself with a Republican caucus of 222 that was without many of the candidates he'd favored but entirely too laden with those who knew he didn't want them.
So, 19 right-wingers, most of the Freedom Caucus, turned down McCarthy's second-mortgage application by which he offered them all that he possibly could.
But the wingnuts hadn't really wanted to compromise in the first place; their political currency is unyielding high-profile disruption, which gets attention and raises money, which are their purposes.
These Freedom Caucus wingnuts assert that they are about issues. Mc- Carthy gave in on several, including making it easier to remove a speaker once seated and setting up a subcommittee to investigate so-called "weaponization of government" by Democrats.
Other issues--such as a national sales tax to replace the income tax and term limits for members of Congress--are wholly out of the question in terms of political practicality. They are valuable only as grandstanding rhetoric for back home.
McCarthy got 203 votes on the first ballot, nine fewer than the new successor to Pelosi as Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries of New York. It was the first time in a century that a party elected to control the House had been unable to elect a speaker with first-ballot orderliness.
In a more functioning political culture, a bipartisan good-government solution might be for the most-moderate or most-practical Democratic House members to strike a blow for functioning government. They could simply decline to cast votes.
Since victory requires a majority not of all House members, but of those voting, a dozen-plus nonvoting Democrats could elevate McCarthy's 203 or so votes over the victory threshold.
But even the most moderate and pragmatic House Democrats had to confront the vexing question: Is Kevin McCarthy--Kevin McCarthy--worthy of our benevolence? Does anyone think he'd return the favor with benevolent bipartisan overture of his own?
The Freedom Caucus says you can't trust McCarthy. That's perhaps one thing it has right.
A final note: This writing takes place late Tuesday after three roll calls failed on the simple proposition of producing a new speaker of the House. Surely that insanity would not long continue. But whatever subsequently happened, Republicans by dusk Tuesday had favored the nation, and Democrats most of all, with self-revelation.
And it was quite a spectacle of the absurd.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.