Well That’s One, Uh, Creative Idea to Resolve the House Speaker Fiasco

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 extremely normal everything has become.

“Right now, the construct is everyone gets in a room, we open a mic, and it’s a therapy session. … That’s not working. … It sounds silly, but let’s go to Gettysburg or something. … We need to sequester ourselves somewhere else outside the beltway.” —GOP Rep. Mike Garcia, after Jim Jordan lost his second speakership vote on Oct. 18

The quest continues, as Republicans endeavor to fulfill perhaps the most basic job of a congressional majority: picking a speaker. It was never going well, and somehow, it’s going worse than ever. Jim Jordan has now lost two speakership elections and, on Thursday, said he would not walk directly into a third unsuccessful vote, following Steve Scalise into a withdrawal and a failed bid. (Although, wait, maybe he will.) In the meantime, the GOP’s Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry will continue the job he’s held since Kevin McCarthy got his pink slip on Oct. 3, possibly with some made-up additional powers to complement his interim role. But even McHenry is nowhere near becoming the for-real full-time speaker of the House.

In their past two weeks, headless Republicans have put together the most disordered display of governance in memory. Some members, like Mike Garcia, who represents a California district won by Joe Biden, are no doubt getting a little antsy. “Therapy” is not a terribly comforting thing to invoke to describe the most basic procedural activity of the legislative chamber.

Garcia’s solution? A weekend getaway to Gettysburg.

Fall is a nice time for travel on the Eastern Seaboard—orange foliage, apple picking—but presumably that suggestion has something to do with the famed Civil War battle and Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Gettysburg Address. Perhaps Garcia thinks taking the fractious GOP caucus to see a be-costumed reenactment of the Union’s great triumph is the very thing that Republicans need to set their differences aside.

But it’s not clear what exactly he expects them to glean from Lincoln. Sure, the House GOP is locked in its own civil war of sorts, but the caucus’ overwhelming majority has chosen repeatedly to nominate a member who was closely involved with an insurrection attempt, voted to overturn the 2020 election results, and then lost. If you had to choose, you’d have to say that that would put them more in league with the Confederacy than the Union. And some House Republicans wouldn’t bristle at that comparison.

The last lines of Lincoln’s address seem somewhat relevant: “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” But then you remember that what these Republicans are looking for in a replacement speaker of the House is someone more willing than Kevin McCarthy was to shut down that very same government.