I’m going to resist commenting too directly on yesterday’s events in Brazil because it is far outside any expertise of mine. But allow me a few observations. The parallels to the January 6 insurrection in the U.S. are obvious and uncanny. To some degree that seems to have been intentional. But there is at least one key difference. On January 6, 2021, the American insurrectionists were trying to disrupt a specific constitutional process essential to the transition of power to the new president. That doesn’t seem to have been the case here. Lula is already president. The Brazilian Congress wasn’t in session. And Lula was in another part of the country.

Even in Brazil there seems to be some real question about just what the plan was and just how far into the military and state security services support for the insurrection went. Watching press reports yesterday there were a number of key governmental officials who are suspected of either being part of the insurrection or passively supporting it who then made showy efforts to arrest perpetrators once things got out of hand. From a distance it looked like something went wrong, like it became clear that whatever was intended wasn’t working and then players who had been taking a wait-and-see approach made hasty efforts to distance themselves from violence. All this said, Brazil is a different country with internal politics I have little understanding of and a very different history from the United States.

Supporters of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro have stormed the seat of the Brazilian Congress after breaking through armed forces cordons. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has already been sworn in as president several days ago and Bolsonaro himself left the country for Florida. The Brazilian Congress is not currently in session. For those reasons it’s not immediately clear to me the aim of the invasion. It’s not clear to me if there is anything happening today in the Brazilian Capital that makes control of the congressional building particularly relevant. Is there something specific they are trying to accomplish as was the case two years ago in Washington, D.C.? Or is it a general show of force? I don’t know. At least the symbolism is clear enough.

Covering the ongoing implosion of George Santos is, in a way, mostly fun and games. But we saw over the last four days how it will soon be something rather different. If you watched TV and photographic coverage of the speakership drama, Rep. Santos spent a lot of time on the floor with Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert. Indeed, he seemed glued to them increasingly over the course of the four days. I doubt that is a coincidence. If there are any GOP reps you want in a foxhole with you against the “fake news” media and the GOP’s RINO establishment, it’s these three. This cannot be an accident.

Right now there are 212 Democrats and 222 Republicans. That will move to 213 to 222 after the special election in Virginia next month. If Santos were to resign he would be replaced in a special election and Democrats would be solid, if not strong, favorites to win that race. If a Democrat was elected, that would move the numbers to 214 to 221. In that scenario Republicans can only lose three members on any vote.

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.

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.

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.

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.