Welcome to Meet the Press. Now I'm Chuck Todd here in Washington, where normally this is the first day of school. Everybody's in a good mood. Everybody's happy. They're taking pictures. The kids are running around. Congress,

not today. We are watching a real-time rupturing inside the House Republican caucus on a day when

virtually all of the Republican Party's divisions and challenges are on full display for the whole

political world to watch. Right now, these are live pictures from the House floor, where for the

first time in 100 years, the House is battling it out on the floor over who will become Speaker.

And it comes as the Republican candidate, Kevin McCarthy, has lost a second vote for Speaker today.

And they're about to start a third.

We expect Steve Scalise to nominate him for Speaker this time.

If and when this third vote proceeds, we will be here to cover that. On the first ballot, McCarthy came well short of the 218 votes needed to become Speaker, with a group of nearly 20 Republicans in the caucus's far-right faction, including members of the House Freedom Caucus, choosing to support someone else. In fact, McCarthy was not even the top

vote getter on the first ballot with the newly minted Democratic leader, Akeem Jeffries,

winning every single vote from the caucus. He's the first Democrat to do that since 2007, by the way.

On the second ballot, the anti-McCarthy vote coalesced around Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan,

who was, interestingly, the member who actually nominated McCarthy on the second ballot.

Same 19 people who voted against McCarthy the first time, voted for Jordan and against McCarthy the second time.

So as for where things go from here, we actually don't know. None of us do.

But by all indications, we may be here for a while.

McCarthy's Republican critics have dug in,

and so is Kevin McCarthy. Here's Florida Republican Matt Gates this afternoon, after opposing McCarthy

on the first ballot during his nominating speech for Jim Jordan as Speaker, taking direct shots

at McCarthy in the process. I rise to nominate the most talented, hardest working member of the Republican conference

who just gave a speech with more vision than we have ever heard from the alternative.

I'm nominating Jim Jordan.

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