President Joe Biden celebrated new infrastructure funding at an event Wednesday with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), in a rare display of bipartisanship that stood in stark contrast to the fiasco that has dominated headlines in Washington.
That McConnell decided to ride along with Biden to the event in Covington, Kentucky, in the Beast, the armored presidential limo, put a punctuation mark on the message of normalcy the two leaders were hoping to send as House Republicans struggled to elect a speaker. The chaos has derailed the ambitions of Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and the formation of the 118th Congress.
The conservative revolt against McCarthy, who has been the GOP House leader, is historic: The lower chamber hasn’t needed more than one ballot to elect a speaker since December 1923. Though, in 1855, the process took 133 ballots and two months to sort out.
Prior to leaving for Kentucky on Wednesday, Biden weighed in by calling the GOP’s predicament “a…
