The Snakes Are Coming From Inside the Plane

 

David Kurtz acknowledges he doesn't entirely know what's going on in the House of Representatives,

I’m not going to sit here and pretend I have a grasp on what is happening in the House. I don’t think anyone really does.

which may make him effectively the most reliable guide, and one of the things he does think he understands is that it's much less important who succeeds to the speakership than whether they manage to scrap the Gaetz-devised rule allowing any member to force a vote on whether the Speaker should stay in office:

if the hair-trigger motion to vacate under the current rules is kept in place, then no speaker will have the authority to lead. It would be a phantom majority. Kevin McCarthy stumbled through nine months of that before it all collapsed.

No one wants the job under those circumstances, nor should they.

The rule delivers absolute power in the House to Gaetz, or some replacement for Gaetz as madman-in-chief (not Jordan, I don't suppose, or Taylor Greene, both of whom parked their loyalty with Kevin McCarthy even while maintaining close ties to Trump, and seem to have developed aspirations to "legitimacy", but more of a pure nihilist like Biggs or Rosendale), and it they can't get rid of it, the next Speaker will be just as impotent as McCarthy was.

Donald don't do this number—

—it's the only one you own...

There was a pretty funky smell, I thought, to the remarks on NPR of acting ICE director Mark Morgan on the subject of his agency's plan for a big sweep of some thousands of undocumented immigrant families starting Sunday:

"My duty is not to look at the political optics, or the will [of] the American people, that's for the politicians to decide," Morgan said. "What the American people should want us to do as law enforcement officials is to enforce the rule of law and maintain the integrity of that system."

Did he mean there was some special reason for enforcing the rule of law this weekend, as opposed to the rest of the time? Launched Monday by an out-of-the-blue presidential tweet (the night before he officially opened his reelection bid in Orlando)?

Next week ICE will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States. They will be removed as fast as they come in. Mexico, using their strong immigration laws, is doing a very good job of stopping people.......

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 18, 2019

No politics there for sure! Though there did seem to be some kind of alleged reason, in Morgan's telling: