Bleak House - Deadlock lays bare Republican dysfunction

Death threats. Screaming matches behind closed doors. A futile cycle of votes that put internecine warfare on full public display. The Republican party last week sank into new depths of disarray and dysfunction - with no remedy in sight.

- David Smith

Never before has America gone so long without a speaker of the House of Representatives and, critics say, not for a very long time has a major party appeared so broken. It has left a branch of the US government leaderless at an extraordinary moment of peril in the Middle East and Ukraine.

A notable setback came last Friday when Jim Jordan, a rightwing Ohio congressman endorsed by former president Donald Trump, lost a third vote to become speaker and was then unceremoniously dumped by Republicans as their nominee. The majority leader, Steve Scalise, said they were going to "come back and start over" this week.

This followed a week of turmoil remarkable even by the fractious standards of the Trump era, with ideological disagreements merging with personal vendettas in a combustible mix. After Kevin McCarthy was ousted on 3 October and Scalise failed to garner enough backing, Jordan, a bare-knuckle rightwinger and election denier, had made an unlikely effort to unite the party.

Meanwhile, Jordan's allies in the Make America Great Again (Maga) movement had deployed a hardball pressure campaign. Every member who voted against him said they had received a barrage of angry phone calls and messages.