A Democrat Made the Worst Suggestion Yet for the Next Speaker of the House

This is Totally Normal Quote of the Day, a new feature where we pull a particularly wild statement from the news as a reminder of just how not normal everything has become.

“He could come back. Obviously, I’m not a real fan of how the Iraq war went, but I would think that any reasonable Republican would be somebody that Democrats could work with.” —Rep. Brad Sherman, Oct. 16, suggesting that former President George W. Bush be nominated as speaker of the House

Republicans are not having an easy time electing a speaker of the House. Kevin McCarthy was ousted on Oct. 5, and no one has been able to get the votes since.

Last week, Rep. Steve Scalise was nominated for the position in a private meeting but didn’t have the votes on the floor. (He withdrew from the running.) This week, Rep. Jim Jordan was nominated for the position in a private meeting and then lost the vote on the floor by a substantial margin. There’s still no solid solution in sight.

Congress is essentially impotent without a speaker, and it currently cannot pass any bills, including bills related to aid for Ukraine or the war in Gaza. Many lawmakers are getting desperate, but that doesn’t mean Democrats aren’t relishing their opposing party’s dysfunction or engaging in a bit of gallows humor. “I think they’re taking lessons in mathematics and learning how to count,” Rep. Nancy Pelosi said of the Republicans on MSNBC.

Rep. Brad Sherman, a Democrat from California, offered that one solution to the quagmire might be to bring in a third party to fill the job: former President George W. Bush. In an interview on Forbes’ politics podcast, Sherman suggested that Bush would make a good consensus candidate because he would be able to work with Democrats. Let that sink in.

Sherman did allow that Jordan would be more politically useful to Democrats—in that Jordan would be, Sherman said, a “disaster”—but he seemed even more interested in a theoretical return to the fictional past of bipartisan peace and cooperation. It’s not an idea that anyone is likely to take seriously—the version of Bush that Sherman conjured is gentler and much more bipartisan than the real man ever was—but it’s not totally absurd: The speaker doesn’t actually need to be a member of the House of Representatives to serve in the role.

And yet. Lest anyone forget the kind of politician the younger Bush was, in an interview with a historian at a private event in Texas this week he described the Palestinians as “cold-blooded killers” who needed to be crushed. “My view is: One side is guilty,” he said of the conflict in Gaza. “And it’s not Israel.” Ugh.