Republicans in Disarray? Nominate Q!

Three more votes today; three failures to elect. If you figure that there are about 250 weekdays in a year, or 500 in two years, that means only 1500 more chances to elect a Speaker — although realistically it’s more like 1400 because they’ll probably stop voting at least a few days before the 2024 election. I know … I know … that I shouldn’t be helping dig the Republican Party out of the muck of its own making while it is in the midst of destroying itself — but I can’t help myself. I’ve already explained to Democrats how they can win half of a loaf to which they were not entitled; to be fair, I want to give some sage advice to Republicans as well.

Ready? Nominate Q.

Q — who, I think we an agree, is not Donald Trump — has been the effective leader of the Republican Party for years now. Q is the leading proponent of the “Make Your Own Adventure” scandals touted by QAnon. It’s true that nobody knows who Q is — but that shouldn’t matter: the Speaker of the House does not have to be a member of the House itself.

One might argue that Q’s identity must be known if Q is to be the Speaker, that Q must be eligible to serve in the House: “No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.” But can anyone prove that this isn’t true of Q? More to the point, does anyone believe that the Supreme Court majority wouldn’t go along with whatever the Republican Party wanted on this matter?

Admittedly, if Q does show up for work someday, Q will have to prove Q’s credentials as Q in order to act as Speaker: specifically, that Q really is Q. And that may be difficult to do. Regardless, of course, even if Q is Q, Q may be deposed at any time by a vote of the body if Q’s — or, to be precise, supposed Q’s — actions aggrieve it. But meanwhile, Q’d have to be treated as elected … but absent.

In other words, the House could begin to go about its business — yay! — with the Majority Leader, um [checks notes] Kevin McCarthy, being able to preside over House sessions as Acting Speaker, but not empowered to exercise the off-floor powers of the office. Those powers — committee assignments, office assignments, other assignments — would have to be exercised by each party’s Majority Leader on their own. (As it should be, frankly.) For decisions involving the entire body, the two Leaders — in the absence of Q — would have to work out their own compromise.

Yeah, the Founders said that there has to be a Speaker of the House — but they never said that the Speaker could not be fictitious! To cite PBS: “Article I, section II of the Constitution says only that the House ‘shall chose [sic] their Speaker and other officers.’ So far, the chamber has only chosen its own members as speaker, but a non-lawmaker is possible.” This is, literally, “chosing” their Speaker — and no better choice could exist for this particular Congress than a phantom.

The beauty of this proposal is that everyone wins. The majority of Republicans get Kevin McCarthy exercising most of the powers of Speaker, albeit not the ones harming Democrats, and without actually even being Speaker. The Death Cult minority of Republicans GETS TO VOTE FOR Q FOR SPEAKER — a perfect dream that they never even know they had! Democrats get to laugh at (and campaign on) the Republicans having had to vote for a fictitious Speaker! And George Santos — who is my pick to make this nomination if the obvious choice, Marjorie Taylor Greene, turns it down — can inscribe himself into the history books for something not entirely repulsive. If they both turn it down, though, then I think that the responsibility to help the Republicans out of their own jam falls to a Democrat like Katie Porter, Adam Schiff, or Jamie Raskin, whoever gets to it first. Or wait — even better! — Nancy Pelosi can do it!

I see only one problem with this plan. Arguably, it would have the effect of making every Q-friendly member of the House its Speaker, on the QAnon slogan’s grounds that “Where We Go One, We Go All.” But frankly, seeing a couple of dozen (or more?) Republican representatives fight it out in a scramble for the podium is not my problem; it’s theirs. I just want to watch a looped video of what will be the best moment of all time on C-SPAN.

So: #SpeakerQ — make it trend! A deranged and inscrutible fake entity is the precisely the Speaker that this House deserves!