Live Updates: House Adjourns Again with No Resolution on Speaker

Why do people always reach to reductionism? As if there aren't great democracies which elect a neutral speaker, and do a significantly better job than this.

I don't like how a notionally neutral role has been distorted into a political weapon. Historically within modern history the UK parliament has had independent and functional speakers and deputy speakers. Lord Thomas of Tonypandy and Betty Boothroyd come to mind. John Berkow rather let the side down with some facetious behaviour in the chamber and bullying accusations but overall, a neutral arbiter between opposing sides chosen from amongst them is possible.

Fast convergence is not inherently a problem. What's a problem here is not the speaker election, it's the underlying dynamics of destroy-the-joint performative dimwits and serial liars. You know this as well as everyone else.

Exactly! Nothing screams “Democracy!” like repeating a vote a dozen and more times until it shows the desired result!

This is embarrassing as they had weeks to iron this out and didn’t.

The whole point of a party is that it's a set of people who have already set aside most of their differences in pursuit of a common set of goals. You resolve general issues among yourselves, then present a more-or-less unified front in public. If you can't do that, you can't do any of the genuinely hard negotiations to achieve your own priorities.

If the majority of the party is willing to tolerate this guy, then anybody going against him breaks the party trust that they need to get anything done. It bodes badly for the rest of the session.

For a lot of the dissenters, that's OK. This has long been the anti-government party, and it's not surprising that a fraction of it are happy to have no sitting legislature at all. It's actually a bit surprising this hasn't happened before.

So this isn't really about "fast convergence". This is about not even getting to the "convergence" step. (Oh, and you'd be surprised at how much complexity and delay there is in the Chinese Communist Party. It does have an absolute leader at the top, but unlike North Korea, it is a functioning government with a lot of internal competition at all of the lower levels.)

It’s very believable given the regular behavior of what pretends to be a governing body.

Entirely believable. The political culture in question supports write in candidates and it's happened before that people make facetious, and fawning proposals on the record. This one has even been proposed as a political framing of how to undo Tramps moral and legal hazard, as if a functional role in a parliamentary chamber is a tool to avoid legal risk.

Except it has happened before in American history.

Just like Jan 6 was the first time the US Capitol has ever been attacked by domestic extremists.