Rep. Tom Emmer's out. Are Republicans playing a game of 'not it' for House speaker?

Taking the term “small government” to its most-absurd conclusion, House Republicans cycled through another House speaker candidate in a matter of hours Tuesday, leaving the governing body ungoverned and themselves looking like clowns in search of a circus with low standards.

GOP Rep. Tom Emmer of was the party’s House speaker designate for all of a few hours before he dropped out, apparently due to lack of interest from his coworkers. Emmer shouldn’t take it personally. Republicans seem wholly disinterested in acting like a functioning political party, as evidence by Tuesday’s bizarro-world chain of events.

Tom Emmer is chosen, then Trump lambasts him, then he steps down

Throughout the morning, the House Republican caucus ran through several rounds of voting to come up with Emmer as the next House speaker nominee. One day earlier, Emmer posted a friendly and flattering note to former President Donald Trump on social media, presumably hoping to curry favor with the multi-indicted presidential primary candidate who still holds sway over his party.

While Emmer was being selected by his House colleagues, another one of Trump’s former lawyers – Jenna Ellis – entered a guilty plea in the Georgia election interference case, promising to testify against Trump and other co-defendants facing racketeering charges.

Trump himself was in a Manhattan courtroom Tuesday morning where he is on trial for fraud, watching his former attorney Michael Cohen testify that the former president had regularly directed him to arbitrarily boost the value of his assets.

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The GOP's love affair with Trump continues to drag the party down

But apparently Trump wasn’t too busy to knife Emmer in the back. Shortly after Emmer became House speaker designate, a post appeared on Trump’s Truth Social page calling the Minnesota Republican “a Globalist RINO” (if you don’t speak Trump, “RINO” means “Republican in name only”) and saying a vote for Emmer as speaker would be “a tragic mistake.”

I guess Emmer’s flattery the day before didn’t take.

After Trump's post, it was only a couple hours before Emmer bailed and House Republicans were back to square one, leaderless and looking like last week’s leftovers, despite being the party with majority control.

Republicans' inability to elect a House speaker shows how broken they are

To summarize: At a time of violent crisis in the Middle East and with America barreling toward a government shutdown, one of our two major political parties is incapable of governing because Republican lawmakers are bickering like over-sugared toddlers while taking marching orders from a failed former president in legal peril up to his bronzer-smudged forehead.

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If Andy Warhol had a conservative brother – let’s call him Hank Warhol – he might have said: “In the future, every Republican will be House speaker for 15 minutes.”

While all the GOP chaos unfolds, Democratic President Joe Biden is diplomatically navigating the unfolding situation in the Middle East, negotiating for the release of hostages held by the terrorist group Hamas and deploying U.S. military vessels to support Israel. You know ... government stuff.

To identify the problem, might I suggest Republicans look in a mirror?

What's happening in Congress is, of course, ridiculous, and as much as I enjoy watching GOP lawmakers flail about like discombobulated nimrods, I think I might be able to help them identify what has them stuck in neutral.

The problem, you see, is that House Republicans are dealing with Republicans. Most of that party lost interest in governing back when Trump came along and supplanted governing with “saying lots of dumb things that don’t mean anything.”

So now the vast majority of them just want to shout and gripe and wave their arms around on TV. Congressional Republicans are learning that present-day Republicans are, and I’ll say this as respectfully as possible, the literal worst.

So if any GOP lawmakers want to actually address the needs of, you know, Americans, they might want to consider striking a deal with non-Republicans, by which I mean Democrats.

At the moment, they’re the only reasonable people in the room.

Follow Paste BN columnist Rex Huppke on X, formerly Twitter, @RexHuppke and Facebook facebook.com/RexIsAJerk