Happy New Year, everyone! Welcome to Positively Dreadful with me, your host, Brian Boyther.

We've got an interesting situation in our hands as we record this episode, which is

it for the first time in a hundred years. We've had a protracted period where there's

no speaker in the house.

We have a breaking news update now on what has become an historic showdown on Capitol

Hill. Republican House leader Kevin McCarthy could not win enough of his own party's votes

to be elected speaker of the house.

Trustration growing in the House of Representatives were members still haven't voted on a new speaker

of the house.

Overnight, sources say Kevin McCarthy offered key new concessions hoping to sway far-right

that Republican holdouts to cast their vote for him as speaker.

If you want to drain the swamp, you cannot put the biggest alligator in charge of the exercise.

I'm a Florida man and I know of what I speak.

And for all intents and purposes, that means there's no House of Representatives at all

because the members who were elected or re-elected in November can't be sworn in until the house

elects a speaker.

So normally this is all a pro-formal exercise, right, like the old Congress adjourns.

Maybe a few hours go by while the new Congress goes through the ceremonial ritual of electing

their speaker, and that person is basically always the leader of the majority caucus.

But this time, a band of about 20 House Republican reactionaries, nearly all of whom were supporters

of the January 6th insurrection, have refused to vote for the GOP leader, Kevin McCarthy.

They've gone through multiple ballots over two days now, and the number of Republican

...