Ben Domenech

The Florida Man had a plan. It was obvious from the beginning, but this being Washington, despite all the bizarre outcomes of the post-Cold War political scene — interns, scandals, impeachments, Donald Trump in the White House and out of it, the Cheneys surrounded by cheering Democrats — normalcy remains the assumed status quo. Normalcy does not encompass a plan to vacate the speaker’s chair with the unanimous help of the other party. In fact, prior to 2019, anyone could have used the same tool the Florida Man would deploy to unseat a speaker. They just never tried it officially, because to do so would be crazy, risking handing control of the House to the minority. And it was that audacity which kept the Florida Man’s plan alive.

Welcome to Thunderdome, where you might think that today would be focused on the off-year election (many lessons on that below) or the debate last night (a few takeaways to be sure), but the breaking news has overtaken all of this: Joe Manchin, the West Virginia senator and former governor, has announced that he will retire rather than run for re-election. Manchin has been at the focal point of one fight after another in the Senate during his tenure, wavering back and forth between working with Democrats and Republicans depending on the issue. His announcement means Republicans are assured of picking up his seat. But there is also a strong indication to it that he does not consider himself done with politics yet.

Welcome to Thunderdome, where for the first time some cracks are showing in the emphatic Democratic support for Joe Biden. Even with his many widely apparent defects as a candidate and a president, Biden’s support from strong Democratic constituencies has remained largely consistent throughout his tenure. The loss of Independent support at this juncture is rationalized away by many Democrats, who feel that once Donald Trump is presumably the GOP nominee, they’ll be able to get all those leaners in the center back in the fold. But now, thanks to his policy choices on Israel, Biden is suffering a major blow among a significant Democrat constituency made more important given its geographic concentration in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania: Arab Americans.

Welcome to Thunderdome, where after three long weeks, the Republicans in the House finally found their path toward a speaker — and boy is it a Flamin’ Hot Cheeto of a choice. Louisiana’s Mike Johnson, known for his kinglike dominance of the green line meme, is your new speaker of the House. He is eminently difficult to categorize, a cipher, an ardent social conservative with little in the way of fiscal conservative instincts but with a lot in favor of Zionist support for Israel. If you are a Squad member, this guy’s your nightmare. But he’s also likely to drive the media crazy, because he’s basically an unupdated social conservative from 2004. Perhaps not exactly what the Democrats had in mind when they helped Matt Gaetz knife Kevin McCarthy.

At long last, House Republicans finally selected their new speaker: Mike Johnson, the Shreveport native who resembles nothing so much as the pale casseroles ubiquitous to Baptist fellowship halls across the American South. They could be white cheddar cheese and boiled potatoes, they could be whipped cream and banana with Nilla wafers — you won't know 'til you take a scoop, but you won't have to chew very much to enjoy it. Mike Johnson is perhaps the furthest thing from Kevin McCarthy in experience. He has no record as a fundraiser. He is a strong social conservative, a version that has not been updated since the mid-2000s.

The first thing you see when you climb out of the Rio Grande into Eagle Pass, Texas, is the homely site of the municipal golf course. Nine holes along the river expanded to eighteen via different tees, the pruned grass of the course is scuffed and torn from the hundreds of thousands of footsteps that have crossed it just this year, rubber soles that trekked from Central and South America to get to this godforsaken patch of green that signifies the US of A and everything it holds for the migrant who dreams of a new life. As welcomes go, it’s no sparkling torch of Lady Liberty.

Welcome to Thunderdome, where a week and a half after the chilling attacks on Israel, the American people have had time to digest the scenes from across the world — from the Middle East and fiery scenes at embassies, to protests on campuses and now on Capitol Hill, fueled by lies from progressive Democrats — and their concern is enormous. The polls show 85 percent of Americans are concerned the Israel-Gaza conflict will erupt into a wider war in the Middle East. And while supermajorities of Republicans, Democrats and Independents still believe it's important to support Israel, Republicans approve of sending Israel weapons by a roughly twenty points more than other factions. (The Quinnipiac numbers are here.

Karol Markowicz has a piece today about cancel culture and the college students who signed on to reprehensible anti-Israel or even pro-Hamas statements, driving donors to pull funding for major higher ed institutions and even leading some professors to say flat-out: don’t hire the people who signed these. I’ve written repeatedly about the difficulty and sloppy definition of the term “cancel culture,” and why I think most people struggle to define it and just fall back on their priors: if someone I like is getting yelled at, it’s cancel culture; if someone I don’t like is getting yelled at, it isn’t.

Welcome to Thunderdome, where this week the 2024 election had its first real sea change in priority and policy focus thanks to the horrific, detestable and utterly evil attacks on Israel by Hamas. The general rule in politics is that foreign policy doesn’t matter for voters, and that’s been true in... actually, wait a minute... not even the majority of presidential elections in the past half century! In 1980, 1984, 1988, 2004, 2008 and 2016, foreign policy played an outsized role in the candidate selection of Republicans and Democrats, and you could even argue that Joe Biden’s false promise of foreign policy normalcy was decisive in 2020.

The likelihood of Steve Scalise's ascent to the speakership is high at this hour, with his 113-99 victory over Jim Jordan in the House Republican Conference meeting. But there are a few challenges ahead that could prove difficult in an upcoming afternoon of voting on the floor. Jordan's total was disappointing for his supporters, who had hoped the vote would effectively be flipped, leading Scalise to bow out and wait for another day, content with his continued role as majority leader. But Jordan's team is not exactly expert at whipping votes, and the abstention of eight members didn't help him any.  What Scalise brings, effectively, is a normal continuity of leadership.

Welcome to Thunderdome, where for once the number one story in the political world barely involves Donald Trump or Joe Biden. Instead, the only story anyone’s talking about revolves around Kevin McCarthy and Matt Gaetz, and an act of political assassination that saw eight Republicans cross party lines to join with unanimous Democrats to lop off the head of the party’s speaker and greatest fundraiser. McCarthy as Ned Stark and Gaetz as Joffrey doesn’t track, exactly, since the boy from Bakersfield wanted that job and gave up enormous leverage to get it — but from the moment Gaetz brought the motion, people in Washington assumed that McCarthy would cut a deal with Democrats to survive. But that proved a bridge too far.

In Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, a posse of violent ne’er-do-wells forced by circumstance into a house together descend, through duplicity, avarice and lies, into bloody chaos which leaves everyone dead. The title is a fitting one for the eight Republicans who crossed party lines to vote with House Democrats, unanimous in their belief that they are better off without Kevin McCarthy as speaker. In doing so, they ensured the House is controlled by Democrats in all but name. As the speaker race begins, the odds favor Steve Scalise or Jim Jordan — both more satisfying to the right wing than McCarthy, but far less capable of fundraising as he did to protect the tenuous hold of moderates in blue states.

An admission of personal bias: I have little to no respect for academics or intellectuals who write about the Congress of the United States. As a student, I was taught by brilliant professors about the dynamics of legislative decisions and negotiation, the nooks and crannies of process and debate, the give and take, the game theory at play. Then, when I arrived on Capitol Hill, within a month I discovered that a certain member had completely changed his position on a piece of legislation — a 180-degree reversal from where he stood before. When I asked an aged veteran legislative aide about why this was possibly the case, he looked at me, bemused, and asked — “He’s getting a divorce. Which lobbyist do you think his wife slept with? This is personal, not politics.

Welcome to Thunderdome everyone, where the top question on our minds after last night’s craptastic showing from the Reagan Library in Simi Valley is: what is the actual point of these debates, and are they actually designed to help the GOP, or just do favors for its partisan enemies? The answer isn’t as obvious as you’d like to think. Surely the point of debates is to offer people a view of the Republican Party as engaged, serious, compelling and caring about the priorities of the American people. That’s all expressions of mood as opposed to policy or ideology, but we’re not getting any of the latter or the former to this point.