And the Gaetz of Hell shall not prevail against them

So McCarthy finally did the right thing, after all other options had been tried and failed.  The nihilist nutballs on the fringe of his own party had made it clear that nothing could placate them, and in any case even a successful effort to do so would have failed to avert a shutdown, since whatever draconian-cut-filled abomination they came up with would have been DOA with the Senate and Biden.  So he brought out a 45-day stopgap which included almost none of the concessions the crazies had been demanding, and it passed with almost all Democrats and a large majority of Republicans on board.  The House as a whole had had a solid majority for a sane solution all along; this problem could have been solved weeks ago, were it not for the speaker's power to gatekeep what can be voted on, and McCarthy's partisan abuse of that power.

Yes, abuse.  The latest shutdown shitstorm is a reminder that the real problem here is loyalty to party over country -- the attitude that the majority party should try as hard as it can to govern with no input from the other party at all, as if the minority's very presence in Congress were somehow illegitimate.  This is an affront to democracy.  Every member of the House was elected.  The goal should always be to reach the most beneficial solution for the country that can get a majority, regardless of the partisan composition of that majority.  When the ruling party cannot unify to pass a pragmatic solution to whatever problem is at hand, reaching out to moderates in the minority party should be the first option, not the last.

The great virtue of a strong two-party system is that, since there are far more than two factions or interest groups in a country, each party ends up being a coalition of such groups -- so that all of them need to be able to compromise with each other in order to keep the party functioning.  Fanatics who refuse to compromise cannot work within a party, and end up being totally frozen out of power, to the benefit of the country.  This is one main reason why I generally oppose third parties -- foreign countries whose systems allow third parties to win seats often end up suffering political paralysis, unstable coalition governments, crazy laws getting passed because a party with a few seats is able to hold the ruling party's majority hostage, etc.

But same mess can arise when the fanatics become part of one party's coalition (or an existing faction evolves into fanatics) and then refuse to compromise even with the rest of their own party.  They act this way believing that they can leverage their position as the critical last few votes in order to force passage of a radical agenda which does not have majority support in their own party nor in the country generally.  That is, they behave like a third party, subverting democracy in the service of extremism.

Well, if such a group behaves like a third party, they should expect to be treated like one, and see the rest of their party shove them aside by reaching out to the opposition party -- using a bipartisan majority to pass something closer to the country's political center.  That's what finally happened in the House.

Now arch-nutbar Matt Gaetz is threatening to file a "motion to vacate" and remove McCarthy from the speakership to punish him for making a deal that overwhelming House and Senate majorities could support instead of pandering to a fringe minority.  If Gaetz does do this, it will give the House Democrats the options of (1) saving McCarthy and making him permanently dependent on them to pass anything, or (2) voting against him and forcing the Republicans into another agonizing and ridiculous series of votes to elect a new speaker, as they did in January (analysis here).  While the Democrats will surely relish having such a choice, Gaetz's own faction would end up either embarrassed or powerless -- but such people are not good at thinking several moves ahead.  As for McCarthy, he might well prefer to work with Democrats from now on, if he has finally grasped that dealing with the lunatics just doesn't produce results.  Biden, whose hopes (when running for office in 2020) for reasonable Republicans he could deal with seemed naïve in light of the obstructionism he had seen close up during Obama's presidency, would doubtless welcome such a development eagerly.

It has been interesting to me to see how the right-wing internet has covered the deal.  Most of the right-wing blogs I read have totally ignored it, as they ignored the whole shutdown fight.  Among "news" sites, Breitbart ludicrously spun the deal as a win for the far right because it includes no aid for Ukraine (the only major concession the wingnuts got); Gateway Pundit stuck to its usual narrative that all Republicans other than the far-right fringe are traitors plotting with the evil communist Democrats to destroy America; and most sites bizarrely focused most of their attention on Jamaal Bowman's fire-alarm stunt, as if that were the main story rather than the bipartisan deal.  Oh, and as for that Ukrainian aid cutoff, it won't last.  McCarthy and McConnell both agree that the aid must continue, and there are reports that a separate bill to ensure that will soon be up for a vote.

The wingnuts thought that, if they could just remain intransigent, the pressures created by the impending shutdown would force the whole government to submit to their agenda.  In fact, those pressures forced McCarthy to resort to the bipartisan cooperation which his party had feverishly struggled to avoid.  Let's hope that they learn their lesson, and that McCarthy learns his.