Go ahead, read it. But you'll likely feel compelled to read it again, and yet again, for Norman Ornstein's "Huntsman for speaker!" op-ed not only resists comprehension, it batters and bloodies it.
They've driven poor Ornstein mad, these dastardly Republicans--so mad, he's reduced to proposing a remedial "action" that is "out-of-the-box," as he puts it, which means he's surrendered all hope and originality to conventionally styled desperation.
The action? "The Constitution does not say that the speaker of the House has to be a member of the House," observes Ornstein, thus the House should "find someone from outside ... to transcend the differences and alter the dysfunctional dynamic we are all enduring."
Dysfunctional dynamic to AEI congressional scholars, perhaps. It's FUBAR to others.
But that's the thing. The speaker isn't the problem. The problem is a prodigiously dysfunctional House majority, from whose internal rot another squalid speakership shall arise.
I can just barely envision one possible but improbable escape: Boehner is reelected; he somehow scraps the Hastert Rule (which requires GOP unity on floor votes); and then he cobbles together a functional coalition of the House's two minorities--Democrats and that surviving breed of despairingly sane Republicans, before they vanish altogether.