At least the U.S. House Republican conference can declare that it well might not have flown the coop completely … at least not yet.

The House GOP selected Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana as its candidate to be the next speaker. He’s not a good choice. Then again the House GOP caucus has a dearth of decent men and women I would want to be speaker of the House.

Then again …

House Republicans could have turned to Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio to succeed Kevin McCarthy as speaker after McCarthy was booted out of the powerful post this past week. Jordan would have been far worse for the House and, more to the point, for the country had he been allowed to compete for the role of Man of the House.

Donald Trump endorsed Jordan, who has been one of the ex-POTUS’s major apologists since Trump lost the 2020 election to Joseph Biden. It is clear to me that Jordan would have taken the House toward the proverbial cliff, sending it off on even more probes to find alleged (and non-existent) wrongdoing among leading Democrats.

The Democratic caucus will nominate someone, too. The frontrunner appears to be House minority leader Hakeen Jeffries of New York. He likely won’t be elected speaker. However, Jeffries elevate the House’s cumulative IQ simply by serving in the chamber.

Congress is broken. The House GOP caucus needs to be tossed aside and reassembled into an organization that follows more closely what the framers had in mind when they crafted the “loyal opposition.”

OK, so I’ll damn the House GOP caucus with faint praise for nominating Scalise as the next speaker by declaring … that it could’ve been a whole lot worse.