Local middle school elects student body President, while congress does not have a speaker!

Often times it seems like a middle school student counsel would be a more mature body to run our country than Congress....

I guess when you play stupid games (like agree to a whole bunch of nonsense to become speaker) you win stupid prizes. McCarthy learned that providing certain concessions to people who did not want him to necessarily be speaker can backfire. McCarthy also made the fatal flaw of trusting Pelosi (who suggested that if he made certain concessions on the continuing resolution that the Democrats would back him if there was a vote to vacate). They obviously didn't.

Now we sit about where we did when McCarthy was elected the first time. Several names and nobody even all that close to getting the votes that they need. It took 15 votes to get McCarthy elected. But 15 might not be enough the second time around. Jim Jordan is the frontrunner, but is still about 16 votes shy of the magic mark. It might as well be 160. Apparently he has a couple of more votes coming (one person who did not vote, while another decided to back him after voting for someone else). But he is still woefully short.

But the sad reality is that many of these hold outs don't really even have a person that they are actually backing, only people who they do not want to see as speaker. You get the impression that if the person they voted for in the last vote was suddenly the frontrunner that they would dodge away and decide to vote against the pack (for sack of voting against the pack). It's almost as if they do not want to see anyone elected speaker.

Personally I feel that the whole speakership mess is overplayed in terms of how the public would perceive it. Most people do not know who the various leaders are, nor do they care. I don't believe most voters believe that Congress is a well oiled machine in the first place and likely see the chaos as par for the course. If the GOP elects someone and they stay in place, nobody is going to care much one way or the other come 2024 election time.