Although he remained stony faced while Kevin McCarthy plumbed the depths of self-abasement to get himself elected House speaker, it would be unnatural if Metairie's own Steve Scalise did not covet the job for himself.
As the GOP's majority leader, Scalise was first in line if McCarthy should falter in a four-day, 15-ballot marathon the likes of which nobody alive had ever witnessed. McCarthy's grip seems so precarious that it may be only a matter of time before Scalise rises to the top.
New rules enable a single member to file a bill ousting the speaker.
This is not just a case of the poisoned chalice, however.
The Freedom Caucus, which brought McCarthy to heel, includes some of the most absurd right-wing extremists on Capitol Hill. No group that includes Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, for instance, has any claim to be in possession of all its marbles. A haven for members of Congress who refused to certify the election result, its relationship with reality inclines to the tenuous.
Against all odds, however, it has staked out a few positions that make a lot of sense. Scalise might have no trouble allowing members 72 hours before they vote on a bill, for instance. Same goes for plans to put an end to pork-barrel legislation running to thousands of pages.
If Scalise does rise to the top of the new Congress, he is not likely to preside over a new, common-sense agenda, however. Exactly what concessions he made to secure the support of the obstructionist nuts remains a mystery.
This is not the first time Louisiana almost had the House speakership in its grasp. Bob Livingston, another Republican from Metairie, was poised to take the top job in 1999 when it transpired that his family-values shtick was a front for yet another Capitol Hill Lothario. Livingston quit Congress to cash in as a lobbyist.
It may be many years before a similar exit from the political hurly-burly is an option for Scalise. He will count himself lucky to have gotten this far after recovering from a gunshot inflicted by some stray nut at congressional baseball practice in 2017.
He also recovered from a political faux pas when it turned out that, as a state legislator, he had addressed a racist gathering in Metairie in 2002.
Or perhaps it wasn't a faux pas. It never comes as a shock, after all, to discover that a Republican from Metairie has some antisemitic or White supremacist skeletons in the closet. This, after all, was home to David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan who won election to the state legislature in 1989, and afterward got the majority of the White vote in elections for governor and the U.S. Senate.
If Scalise ever were elected speaker, that would make him third in line for the presidency, which is about as sobering a thought as could be imagined. Neither Livingston nor Scalise ever struck a casual observer as a natural leader of the western world.
The closest we came to elevating a speaker to the top job man came in 1974, when former House Minority leader Gerald Ford replaced Richard Nixon, who had appointed him vice president in place of the disgraced Spiro Agnew.
Email James Gill at gill504nola@gmail.com.