“A Very Bad Place”: Kevin McCarthy Basically Admits His Party Is a Total Clusterfuck

On Friday morning, Jim Jordan lost his third vote to become the next Speaker of the House. While still a far cry from the whopping 14 rounds Kevin McCarthy lost before ultimately winning the job in January, the current situation appears to be somehow even more desperate. That’s because Republicans are not anywhere near a consensus on who should lead the House—which was made readily apparent after they formally dropped Jordan as the nominee following a closed-door vote.

In a sign of just how shockingly disastrous things have gotten, even McCarthy, who earlier in the week was simply blaming everything on Democrats, admitted Friday that Republicans “are in a very bad place right now.” He specifically blamed the “Crazy Eights,” who voted to oust him earlier in the month, for the chaos, and added, “I’ve never seen this amount of damage done…it’s astonishing to me.”

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The decision to officially drop Jordan came shortly after said Crazy Eights put out a letter proposing that if the Jordan holdouts—whose numbers had grown with each successive ballot—“would be willing to ‘vote with the team’ and elect him the 56th House Speaker, we are prepared to accept censure, suspension, or removal from the Conference to accomplish this objective.” The letter was signed by representatives Andy Biggs, Ken Buck, Tim Burchett, Eli Crane, Matt Gaetz, Bob Good, Nancy Mace, and Matt Rosendale.

Such a proposition seemed unlikely to have any chance of actually working for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that after the letter was released, Ken Buck told a Politico reporter that he had never signed it and claimed he didn’t want his name on it and that he has no intention of electing Jordan.

According to CNN, representatives Kevin Hern of Oklahoma, Austin Scott, Jack Bergman, Tom Emmer, and Byron Donalds have all said they will jump into the Speaker race, with Mark Green of Tennessee, Jodey Arrington, and Mike Johnson “considering running.”