The Republican caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives will vote today by a secret-ballot majority of the membership of 247 to install Californian Kevin McCarthy as speaker to replace John Boehner.
That probably won't be the end of that.
The speaker is not a party position, but a House position, second in line to the presidency, and the entire House must vote on whom to install.
Boehner has scheduled that full House vote for Oct. 29. Democrats almost assuredly will vote for their minority leader, Nancy Pelosi. The question then becomes whether McCarthy can secure a majority of the full Congress, meaning 218 votes from the Republican membership of 247.
It is believed that McCarthy's winning margin in the party caucus today will be substantial, but perhaps not 218.
That's because he's now challenged credibly from the House Republicans' zany and insurgent right-wing fringe, a kind of Tea Party element. That's in the person of Jason Chaffetz of Utah, who got caught displaying a bogus chart last week as he headed the committee executing the Planned Parenthood smear, and who, for good measure, has declined to rule out impeaching President Barack Obama or shutting down the government again rather than raise the debt ceiling.
A floor fight wholly among the reigning Republicans and between their rival groups--meaning the very conservative wing of McCarthy and the nutty conservative wing of Chaffetz--would be an unsettling spectacle.
It's the thing Boehner quit in order to avoid.
But McCarthy is Boehner's second-in-command and the nutty wing doesn't like the prospect of more of the same, meaning concession to reality and process and negotiation and compromise.
McCarthy, a nice-looking guy of interpersonal skill who has risen remarkably since his election to the House in 2006, is thought to be a little more sensitive and obliging than Boehner to the nutty wing.
He surely showed everyone last week that he is willing to pander to that nutty right wing. But he didn't show anybody that he knows how to do it smoothly, or even competently.
What he said on Fox News--by way of asserting the success of the House under his secondary leadership--was that Hillary Clinton was presumed to be on her way to the presidency, but then House Republicans set up that select committee to investigate Benghazi and, as a result, she's in a polling freefall.
The Clinton campaign has already rushed out a television spot titled "Admit," explaining that the likely speaker-to-be had let slip that House Republicans used the aegis of their institution to exploit a tragedy for their cynical political advantage.
That's one of those things everybody knows but that no Republican is supposed to say. It meets Michael Kinsley's famous definition of a political "gaffe," which is ... uh, oh ... truth.
Soon after McCarthy told that truth, Chaffetz announced he would challenge him for the speakership because an option to move more abruptly from the Boehner era was needed, and because, as he put it, "we need a speaker who can speak."
I might accidentally have been mildly prescient on this matter. McCarthy, then the fast-rising No. 3 man in the House hierarchy, came to the Clinton School to give a speech in 2011, and I attended. I remembered being unimpressed. So I looked back to see what I wrote at the time. It was that McCarthy delivered "blithe irrelevance."
Actually, that may be precisely what McCarthy needs to get back to delivering. Admitting that you have defiled a congressional institution for pure campaign purposes is not so blithe and not so irrelevant.
Presumably Chaffetz sees himself as better able to steer clear of expressions of unattractive truth.
Indeed, he can make a bit of a partisan shambles of the truth.
A couple of weeks ago he was chairing that inquest into Planned Parenthood and showing off a chart that he said was from Planned Parenthood itself. It showed a rise in abortions by Planned Parenthood. But the witness from Planned Parenthood said she'd never seen such statistics. Then she noticed--or someone noticed for her--that the chart was compiled by a deeply partisan anti-abortion group.
Chaffetz held his ground and declined to acknowledge that he had been caught red-handed being full of it.
So in the current climate, Chaffetz is a speakership candidate to be reckoned with and a worthy challenger to a front-runner alternately blithely irrelevant and so challenged as a communicator as to be accidentally truth-telling.
Either way, I'm thinking the republic will be in the ironic and even frightful position of needing to depend on the occasional pragmatism of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
He keeps looking moderate by being only very conservative--not zanily so--and occasionally accepting of the procedural barriers to passage of any Tea Party manifesto.
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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 10/08/2015