Meanwhile the House is paralyzed. Imagine if this were a presidential year. Tomorrow is January 6, the anniversary of the insurrection and the day the Congress would need to meet to certify electoral votes.

From the Bulwark article:

As Kevin McCarthy repeatedly fails to secure enough votes to become speaker and the House of Representatives sits in limbo, Democrats say they are increasingly concerned about the risks to national security involved in a prolonged period without any active members or ability to conduct legislative business.

Currently, every elected member of the House has yet to be sworn in to office, leaving committee structures up in the air and creating a backlog of onboarding for freshmen and their staffs.

Lawmakers’ families who came to Washington for the pomp and circumstance of the first day, including the swearing-in of members, have grown exhausted waiting. House staffers have lamented they have no work to start until there’s a successful vote. Meanwhile, freshmen members have been prevented from accessing official House emails; some prematurely sent out press releases announcing their swearing-in, even though it has yet to happen.

A more serious matter is the committee work. Although most committees under a GOP majority are expected to shift the focus of their work, there is some committee work that should have continued over from the previous Congress and already been underway. Right now, however, members of Congress are unable even to view classified documents. This has some Democrats uneasy about the next few days—and if the speakership impasse drags out, potentially much longer.

“We can’t even do basic things,” Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Cal.) told The Bulwark. “We can’t conduct any oversight. You can’t have an entire branch of government simply not function. And we don’t have a House right now because no one’s even sworn in.”

“And the chaos on the Republican side is having real consequences for the country and it’s going to get very serious very fast,” he added. “Imagine if there’s some unexpected crisis either domestically or somewhere in the world and you needed Congress to act. We couldn’t right now because we don’t have a speaker.”

Lieu also painted a picture of a future speakership fight with even more disturbing consequences—if a dispute like this were to occur during a year in which Congress is charged with certifying a presidential election….

Jerry Nadler, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, joined Lieu in suggesting that Republicans are neglecting their duties and putting the country in a dangerous position.

“If God forbid there was a crisis we couldn’t respond to it in any way,” Nadler said. “Either [Republicans] do and they don’t care or they don’t understand it.”

From The New York Times: ‘Nobody Is in Charge’: A Ragged G.O.P. Stumbles Through the Wilderness.

After two days of chaos and confusion on the House floor, Republicans have made it abundantly clear who is leading their party: absolutely no one.

From the halls of Congress to the Ohio Statehouse to the back-room dealings of the Republican National Committee, the party is confronting an identity crisis unseen in decades. With no unified legislative agenda, clear leadership or shared vision for the country, Republicans find themselves mired in intraparty warfare, defined by a fringe element that seems more eager to tear down the House than to rebuild the foundation of a political party that has faced disappointment in the past three national elections.

Even as Donald J. Trump rarely leaves his Florida home in what so far appears to be little more than a Potemkin presidential campaign, Republicans have failed to quell the anti-establishment fervor that accompanied his rise to power. Instead, those tumultuous political forces now threaten to devour the entire party.

Nowhere was that on more vivid display than the House floor, where 20 Republicans on Wednesday stymied their party from taking control for a second day by refusing to support Representative Kevin McCarthy’s bid for speaker.

“Nobody is in charge,” John Fredericks, a syndicated right-wing radio host and former chairman of Mr. Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns in Virginia, said in an interview. “Embrace the chaos. Our movement is embracing the chaos.”

That ideology of destruction defies characterization by traditional political labels like moderate or conservative. Instead, the party has created its own complicated taxonomy of America First, MAGA and anti-Trump — descriptions that are more about political style and personal vendettas than policy disagreements.

This iteration of the Grand Old Party, with its narrow majority in the House empowering conservative dissidents, represents a striking reversal of the classic political maxim that Democrats need to fall in love while Republicans just fall in line.

“The members who began this have little interest in legislating, but are most interested in burning down the existing Republican leadership structure,” said Karl Rove, the Republican strategist who embodies the party’s pre-Trump era. “Their behavior shows the absence of power corrupts just as absolutely as power does.”

Read the rest at the link.

The House will meet again this afternoon, and we’ll see if McCarthy’s concession make any difference. Even if they elect him, he will be an extremely weak speaker and the crazies will still be in charge. I just saw on CNN that Republicans are expected one or two more losing ballots and another adjournment. This is insane.

In other news, President Biden is showing real leadership.

Yahoo News: In bipartisan event with McConnell, Biden shows contrast with House Republicans.

“Total chaos.”

That was how President Biden described conditions on the frequently congested Brent Spence Bridge between Covington, Ky., and Cincinnati, where he arrived on Wednesday to tout implementation of his $1.2 trillion infrastructure plan, of which $1.5 billion will be used to fix the notorious crossing.

But the phrase, uttered on the banks of the Ohio River, could have just as easily been used to describe the state of affairs on the Potomac, where chaos has reigned for the last two days, as Republicans failed to select a speaker of the House of Representatives. In what is turning out to be an increasingly acrimonious battle, a group of around 20 far-right conservatives are resisting what had once been seen as the all-but-certain elevation of Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., to the speakership.

Their resistance, which has resulted in six inconclusive votes since Tuesday, has embarrassed mainstream Republicans while providing the White House with a narrative almost too obvious in its juxtapositions.

Flanked by members of both parties, including Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, both of whom are Republicans, Biden was happy to bask in the contrast with congressional GOP members, who won control of the House in last November’s election. Two days into the 118th Congress, however, Republicans have managed only to lay bare their ideological and political differences.

“I just think it’s a little embarrassing,” Biden told reporters from the South Lawn of the White House before departing for Kentucky. “And the rest of the world is looking.”

The speakership fight seemed to validate Biden’s argument — made insistently in the months and weeks before last year’s midterms — that the Republican Party had fallen captive to a pro-Trump “MAGA” faction that was uninterested in governing. Inside the West Wing, staffers have been watching the GOP’s internecine fight with quiet relish, recognizing the scenes of intraparty acrimony as a kind of political gift that was best left to unspool on its own.

“I hope they get their act together,” Biden told reporters.

Read more at the Yahoo link.

Elon Musk’s Twitter is another embarrassment for right wingers.

From The Washington Post: Hackers leak email addresses tied to 235 million Twitter accounts.

Records of 235 million Twitter accounts and the email addresses used to register them have been posted to an online hacking forum, setting the stage for anonymous handles to be linked to real-world identities.

That poses threats of exposure, arrest or violence against people who used Twitter to criticize governments or powerful individuals, and it could open up others to extortion, security experts said. Hackers could also use the email addresses to attempt to reset passwords and take control of accounts, especially those not protected by two-factor authentication.

“This database is going to be used by hackers, political hacktivists and of course governments to harm our privacy even further,” said Alon Gal, co-founder of the Israeli security company Hudson Rock, who spotted the posting on a popular underground marketplace.

The records were probably compiled in late 2021, using a flaw in Twitter’s system that allowed outsiders who already had an email address or phone number to find any account that had shared that information with Twitter. Those lookups could be automated to check an unlimited list of emails or phone numbers.

Twitter said in August that it had learned of the vulnerability in January 2022 through its reward program for bug reports and that the vulnerability had been accidentally introduced in a code update seven months before that.

In July, hackers were spotted selling a set of 5.4 million Twitter account handles and associated emails and phone numbers, which Twitter said was the first it learned that someone had taken advantage of the flaw.

The much larger data dump was almost certainly compiled in the same way and has been offered for private sale and circulated for a while before the recent publication, Gal said.