Hey, good morning. I'm playbook co-author Eugene Daniels. It's Wednesday, October 4th, and there is only one story driving the day. It's one story that's probably going to drive the week, the next few weeks.

Americans are waking up this morning without a duly elected Speaker of the House. Kevin McCarthy yesterday

became the first speaker in U.S. history to be removed from office in the middle of this term.

The whole saga played out over the course of nine months, the climax. Still kind of shocking,

though. Not a surprise, but very shocking. McCarthy getting out maneuvered by Florida

Representative Matt Gates,

who got seven other Republicans and every last Democrat to join him in sending McCarthy

out of the speakership. Now, we're in for at least a week of Palace Intrigue, in fighting

as the House GOP scrambles, to pick a new leader and figure out what they're going to do next.

From the moment that McCarthy gave just one person the power to get the motion to vacate moving, the right wing was kind of never going to get what they wanted out of him.

So this is something we all saw coming.

Joining me now to discuss what happened and what could happen and everything that went down

is our editor at Playbook Mike DeBonis. Mike, good morning. You were an old school house Senate person,

so you know what happened. You know the deal. Good morning, Eugene. And yes, I did see some things

during my time as a Hill reporter, but I did not see this.

I was going to say, you know, before we get into like the questions of kind of all of the things that happened, this is, we've never seen anything like this.

We've seen, you know, all of the, the last few Republican speakers have had issues with a conference that feels kind of uncontrollable.

But this feels so much more personal. Like the animus is not about policy. How different does that

feel for you as someone who's been watching all of this kind of unfold over the last years?

I mean, there's always been personalities in Congress. Like, you know, it's, it's driven a lot of

drama over the years. But for it to culminate in this is pretty astounding. I mean, I was up there

in 2015 when John Boehner was getting threatened with the so-called motion to vacate. And, you know, it ended up getting filed, but it never was really wielded against him directly.

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