The Patrick McHenry expanded Speaker duties idea is dead, ladies and gentlemen. In an hours long shouting match behind closed doors, Republicans proved themselves incapable yet again of making the simple decision about who should lead them after they stupidly ousted Kevin McCarthy for doing politics the old-fashioned way and compromising in order to keep the government open.

By all accounts, the closed door conference meeting was an all-out brawl, with Kevin McCarthy telling Matt Gaetz to "sit the fuck down" at one point, with Gaetz refusing, because he is a nasty piece of work.

Just minutes ago, Jim Jordan emerged from the room where near-fisticuffs happened earlier, and made a statement. "So I'll just say this, we made the pitch to members on the resolution as a way to lower the temperature and get back to work," he told reporters. "We decided that wasn't where we're going to go."

"I'm still running for speaker and I plan to go to the floor and get the votes and win this race," he declared. "But I want to go talk with a few of my colleagues, particularly I want to talk with the 20 individuals who voted against me so that we can move forward and begin to work for the American people."

There is a problem though. Those 20 may now in fact be 30, and no one is budging either way. So they go on to another round of voting, which I'm guessing will start right around the same time President Biden addresses the nation about the crises in Israel and Ukraine, since that's how they roll.

CNN hosts Brianna Keilar and Boris Sanchez summarized the clown show.

Let's take a step back and review what has transpired over the last few weeks.

So Republicans, Matt Gaetz specifically of Florida, files a motion to vacate Kevin McCarthy as speaker.

Eight Republicans vote for it, all Democrats vote for it, it succeeds.

Then they go into conference, they dominate two folks, Jim Jordan and Steve Scalise of Louisiana.

Scalise wins the nomination.

But they don't respect the majority rule vote as they normally do.

Right.

He bows out.

He bows out.

Jim Jordan wins the nomination process again when he puts himself up again, goes to the floor twice, fails twice, loses support, fails more the second time around.

Then he goes into conference and says that he would support a motion to empower the temporary speaker Patrick McHenry to have the power through at least January to pass laws, to keep the government open, to fund.

They want this. This is not a feature, it's a bug, part of their overall nihilism. The whole idea is to break government so they can say government is broken and then hand it to the billionaires to change democracy into totalitarianism. It's sick, anti-American and a slow-moving insurrection.