House GOP has run out of options as 'wacko birds' take over: Ex-Republican insider

After a chaotic series of events that saw multiple House Republicans vie for the speakership nomination and former President Donald Trump putting his thumb on the scale, the GOP appears to be coalescing behind Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA), a backbench lawmaker who was heavily involved in strategizing how to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

In retrospect, wrote former GOP strategist Tim Miller for The Bulwark, it was inevitable that Republicans would go down this path.

"For about a decade and a half now the governing wing of the party has attempted every strategy imaginable to delay handing congressional leadership power to the group of lawmakers who better represent the desires of today’s GOP voters — the erstwhile renegades the late John McCain dubbed 'wacko birds,'" wrote Miller. "That group has grown from only a handful of troublemakers to a significant bloc of Congress that’s bolstered by an additional group of 'closet normals' who dress in wacko bird costumes for the retweets."

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"Among the many lowlights of this long-running spectacle of appeasement: engaging in wildly irresponsible brinkmanship, granting plum committee assignments to kooks, submitting to power-sharing arrangements and hosting struggle sessions with the House Freedom Caucus, launching sham impeachment inquiries, holding umpty-nine explicitly political hearings over a deadly embassy attack, flying down to an extremely dated South Florida resort to take degrading pictures with a wannabe authoritarian, defending a drag queen fabulist in their ranks, and, most egregiously, agreeing to be complicit in an attempt to overthrow our democracy to soothe the bruised ego of the man-baby-in-chief," Miller continued.

The House GOP will take a vote on Johnson on Wednesday — and ultimately, argued Miller, his candidacy represents a failure of the longtime GOP establishment's strategy of using their fringe flank while keeping them out of real power.

"So long as the Republican leaders kept giving inch after inch after inch on the Fox outrage du jour, they could avoid an intraparty coup and retain power — until some glorious day in the future when sanity would return and their torment at the hands of these nutjobs would be over," Miller wrote. "Eventually you run out of road."