The ongoing row in the House is about more than Kevin McCarthy and his totally unironic campaign for Speaker. At its most interesting, it’s a story about how winning can sometimes put you in a trickier place than losing.

Consider: going into the last election cycle, the Democrats controlled the House, leaving the Republican fringe with nothing to gain by aggressively going against mainstream elements of the Republican party, a primary source of funding and support. Now, having won control by a particularly slim margin, the Republican party finds itself, once again, at the mercy of a growing internal fringe. For the party to achieve any of the partisan aspects of its agenda, every vote will increasingly count, and every fringe voice will increasingly be amplified.

If McCarthy–or his successor nominees–are to succeed in this environment, conventional wisdom suggests that they will have to make major concessions to the fringe right, a group of about twenty representatives not strongly tied to the traditional GOP. And so, the tail will continue to wag the dog for the foreseeable future.

After all, the alternative is to go without a Speaker indefinitely. And while some in the newly empowered fringe may claim to hope for the kind of de facto government shutdown that would ensue, most people would view the costs and risk resulting from prolonged disfunction in the House as a failure. The question for the mainstream Main Street and Wall Street Republican majority becomes: do you really want to play chicken with a bunch of people posing as irrational zealots–again?

What if there were a third option? One that involved quickly putting in place a broadly popular government while simultaneously disarming and disempowering the fringe minority? What if, in other words, the tail didn’t have to wag the dog?

There is in the House, right now, a very large group of representatives that could make that happen: the Democrats.

So far, of course, they’ve voted as a consistent block for Hakeem Jeffries, the party’s choice for Majority Leader. With no incentive to break ranks, they sit, contentedly unified, watching, sometimes gleefully, while the Republican party paints itself incompetent.

It’s not like the Democrats have an incentive to vote for someone who has expressed a desire to disown, disavow, and retaliate for the January 6th hearings; directly advanced election denialism; and otherwise promises to politicize the normal course of business in a range of important areas.

But what about a centrist, middle-right Republican? Someone with a penchant for bipartisanship, capable of openly and publicly acknowledging the many problems with our current political culture, viscerally embodied by the Capital riots?

Picture a Speaker who recognizes that dogma begets disfunction. Who forms rules and committees thoughtfully, with an eye towards balance and optimization. Who empowers members of both the political right and the political left to carve out and advocate for bipartisan legislation. Someone, in other words, who would seek to give voice to the people’s bipartisan views. Who is this person??

Notice that this approach would immediately neuter the fringe right. Instead of making concessions to a vocal minority, a centrist Speaker could offer a choice: join the party in adopting a more moderate conservative agenda or explain to your electorate next election why you accomplished nothing.

It feels like since Newt Gingrich and the founding of modern conservative media, the right has increasingly justified the mischaracterization of its opponents on the left with an “ends justifies the means” take on American politics. It’s hard to imagine the right not working towards the rhetorical evisceration of a Speaker from the Democratic party. It’s what’s good for ratings! But somehow the reverse rings less true–a centrist, pragmatic conservative could be accepted by left-leaning Americans and the liberal media. In all events, Republicans are used to playing the bad guys.

Could a sufficient number of Democratic representatives be convinced to show support for a truly centrist Republican committed to running the House in a bipartisan manner? Could one? After all, the Republicans did win, if only barely. They’ve earned the right to appoint a Speaker from their party. Surely there’s someone in their ranks Democrats like, respect, and could support…

Sadly, the laws of political inertia, mutable though they may be, suggest that such a deal is beyond hoping for–even if it could herald a period of revolutionary legislative productivity. Having held deputy leadership roles in the House for more than a decade, McCarthy’s destiny has always been tied to the Speakership. Like young gun Republicans before him, his future political relevance depends on victory here, and so, he seems likely to keep up the fight until forced to relent.

McCarthy himself would probably offer some platitude like “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take…” It’s up to mainstream Republicans to decide how many shots McCarthy ultimately gets. The rest of us need not hold our breath.