Not surprising. But now that McCarthy is zeroing in on the speakership, it comes out: McCarthy agreed to back the Freedom Caucus on the next debt ceiling hostage crisis.

Events last night and especially over the last 20 minutes or so should remind us of a basic reality. This drama is not an ideological fight within the Republican Party. It’s a argument within the Freedom Caucus about which person they will choose for speaker who, in turn, has to do exactly what they tell him to do. That sounds cheeky. And it may be. But it’s the reality of the situation. It’s Freedom Caucus players who are the key people on both sides of the contest. It now seems like McCarthy’s advocates in the Freedom Caucus are carrying the day.

I’m pretty sure what the negotiators are having to agree to are deals that not only greatly limit the powers of Kevin McCarthy as speaker but significantly hardwired the House to be controlled by the Freedom Caucus. The argument here is about which Freedom Caucus faction could best secure that outcome.

The 12th ballot for speaker is underway, and Kevin McCarthy has already picked up a few new votes. That’s the first movement toward McCarthy in a couple of days. It doesn’t appear at this point to be a wholesale capitulation by McCarthy foes. But if you’re following closely for a sign of a shift, there’s a few so far. Check it out.

TPM Reader JO makes a point I confess had not occurred to me. If Republicans again place Donald Trump’s name in nomination to serve as the next speaker, Democrats should raise a point of order that Trump is in fact ineligible to serve as speaker under the 14th Amendment because he previously “engaged in insurrection” against the United States. The Constitution placed essentially no qualifications on potential speakers. They do not have to be members of Congress. But the 14th Amendment prohibition clearly trumps that open door by disqualifying anyone who has engaged in insurrection or rebellion from holding “any office, civil or military, under the United States.” That unquestionably includes the speakership, one of only a handful of federal offices explicitly created by the constitutional text. If Trump engaged in insurrection, he is clearly ineligible to serve as speaker.

That is where things stand.

(In all seriousness we will be bringing back my daily Editors’ Blog post next week after our brains recover from the dumpster that is on fire on the House floor right now.)

In the meantime, Emine Yücel and I are covering all of today’s madness here.

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There’s a dog not barking here that may be obvious but is worth mentioning. It’s not just that Donald Trump’s low-energy endorsement of Kevin McCarthy isn’t carrying the day. It’s that Trump’s name hasn’t really come up at all. Lauren Boebert, in her nominating speech, name-checked him to note how his endorsement of McCarthy was not swaying her. But that’s the exception that proves the rule. Not in the sense that she’s not taking Trump’s guidance but because she’s even discussing him. Trump’s wishes, feelings, threats, anger and really anything else about him are just completely absent from this entire drama. In a way that is the biggest story here.

I thought it was worth making a simple point. The spectacle of the last two days is an embarrassment. The House GOP and really the GOP generally has shown itself incapable of governing in the most basic sense. But I’ve heard some suggestions that this is sort of a lo-fi reenactment of the events of two years ago: more chaos, more craziness, more dysfunction. It’s worth pushing back a bit on that appraisal. This is democracy. If anything there is something a bit invigorating about seeing vote after vote where the outcome, immediate or eventual, isn’t at all clear. One vote, followed by various frenzied negotiation, another vote, followed by more.

The House is set to come back into session at 8 p.m. ET. You can follow along with the TPM team here. But the House may not be in session for long. Kevin McCarthy told reporters he thought it was “best” not to vote again tonight because the results would be the same (he falls short of a majority) but that talks were continuing. Not a sure bet we’ll see a quick adjournment, but that definitely looks possible.

When we talk about the GOP as a failed state run by assorted warlords think about stuff like this.

Today’s and yesterday’s events were predictable, unbelievable and hilarious all at once. One increasingly common refrain from analysts and reporters is that the issue between Kevin McCarthy and his now-20-plus rebels is really personal. They don’t trust him, will never trust him. Perhaps. But this personalizing analysis ignores the larger dynamic that has been unfolding in the Republican Party for more than a decade. We might trace the roots of the present moment to Barry Goldwater, to Newt Gingrich, to the Tea Party, or to Donald Trump. But the key turning point here is 2008 and 2009 when the GOP ceased to function as a center-right party of government and became something more like the sectarian revanchist parties that have long existed on the margins of European parliamentary politics. 

But the U.S. isn’t a parliamentary democracy. Its constitutional structure makes it all but inevitable that two coalitional parties will trade power back and forth. This shift in the GOP happened along with a deep fracture, and an inevitable one in an American context. The House Freedom Caucus was nominally formed in 2015. But it was an institutionalization of the Tea Party radicalism that had its roots in the shift from Republican to Democratic rule in 2008 and 2009.