Now that a couple of weeks have passed and the noise has begun to subside, we can take a broader view of what McCarthy’s election suggests about Congress and the state of American politics. The media had it wrong: to equate Mr. McCarthy’s struggles to win the Speakership with political dysfunction is to grossly misunderstand both politics and Congress. In truth, the long debate over who should be speaker was a healthy expression of Madisonian transactional politics, and it helped illuminate the path toward restoring the people’s House as the seat of American self-government…. (Read more)