It all started in January 2023, when the new Congress was sworn in the Republicans had regained the House by a small margin. Kevin McCarthy was the “heir apparent” to be Speaker of the House, but the problem soon became clear: the so-called “Suicide Caucus,” the far-right lunatic fringe House members, hated McCarthy and did all they could to oppose him. To eventually win their support, McCarthy made a series of concessions to them which sealed his fate. The fact that McCarthy was able to keep the Republicans in some semblance of order for the better part of nine months is extraordinary, but the concessions he made were like the sword of Damocles over his head.

In the past month, McCarthy tried to appease the Suicide Caucus by backing their efforts to – LMAO – impeach Joe Biden for no discernible reason. Then McCarthy didn’t have enough Republican votes to pass a simple budget extension over the weekend, so he went begging to the Democratic caucus, and together they managed to finagle a clean, 45-day budget extension. That’s when the MAGA sh-t hit the Nazi fan. The Suicide Caucus was incandescent with rage that McCarthy SPOKE (!) to Democrats (!!) and worked out a deal with them (!!!). The lunatics decided to use some of McCarthy’s concessions against him, and that creepy human trafficker Matt Gaetz led the charge. Soon it was all-out war within the Republican majority, MAGA vs. MAGA, Nazi vs. Nazi, and in the end, McCarthy was ousted as Speaker.

The House on Tuesday voted to oust Kevin McCarthy from the speakership, a move without precedent in modern history that left the chamber without a leader and plunged it into chaos.

Democrats joined with a small group of hard-liners in Mr. McCarthy’s own party to strip the California Republican of the speaker’s gavel in a 216 to 210 vote. It was the culmination of a bitter power struggle between Mr. McCarthy and members of a far-right faction who tried to block his ascent to the speakership in January and have tormented him ever since, trying to stymie his efforts to keep the government funded and the nation from defaulting on its debt.

Before the vote, a surreal Republican-against-Republican debate played out on the House floor as members of the hard-right clutch of rebels railed against their own speaker and verbally sparred with Mr. McCarthy’s defenders. Democrats sat silently.

A vacancy in the speaker’s chair essentially paralyzes the House until a successor is chosen, according to multiple procedural experts. That promises to tee up another potentially messy speaker election at a time when Congress has just over 40 days to avert another potential government shutdown.

[From The NY Times]

Apparently, there were some murmurs among House Democrats about whether some of them should help out McCarthy. But then Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called a closed-door meeting on Tuesday and told his caucus not to lift a finger to help that MAGA dumbass. In fact, McCarthy had screwed over Democrats so many times, including just this past Sunday, when McCarthy went on CBS and claimed that Democrats *wanted* a shutdown… right after he begged them for their support in getting a clean extension passed. The eight Republicans who voted to remove McCarthy: Andy Biggs of Arizona, Ken Buck of Colorado, Tim Burchett of Tennessee, Eli Crane of Arizona, Matt Gaetz of Florida, Bob Good of Virginia, Nancy Mace of South Carolina and Matt Rosendale of Montana.

Photos courtesy of Cover Images.