As Kevin McCarthy’s bid to become speaker stretched into another day with no resolution in sight, the sharp divisions and general dysfunction on display among House Republicans have made one thing clear: This standoff is about much more than just Kevin McCarthy. 

The California Republican, of course, is a big part of it. His decision to press forward with his speaker bid, despite lacking the needed votes to secure the gavel, has made the first 48 hours of the 118th Congress among the most chaotic in modern history. Twenty Republicans have rejected his candidacy, despite various promised concessions – essentially paralyzing the House, which has been unable even to swear in new members, let alone move on to things like committee assignments and legislative business. 

But the messy game of political chicken is also a tidy window into the internal dynamics currently roiling the Republican Party. Following a disappointing midterm election, Republicans are deeply, publicly divided over their own identity, the possible return of former President Donald Trump, and what they actually hope to accomplish in governing. Whoever wins the gavel at this point, whether it be Mr. McCarthy or someone more palatable to his far-right Freedom Caucus detractors, will face the unenviable task of trying to hold together a party that has only cleaved further apart over the past decade. 

In many ways, the seeds of this week’s drama were planted years ago. Mr. McCarthy’s Republican predecessors, former Speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan, faced similar pushback from conservative lawmakers who wanted to fight anything that felt like “traditional Washington” – including their own leaders. “What they’re really interested in is chaos,” Mr. Boehner wrote in his memoir after leaving Congress. “They want to throw sand in the gears of the hated federal government until it fails and they’ve finally proved that it’s beyond saving.”

Those divisions took a new shape during the Trump years, as the polarizing president drove some Republicans out of the party while others subsumed their differences for the sake of unity. But the current speaker standoff represents more than the return of an old itch: All but three of the 20 McCarthy opponents were elected during or after the Trump presidency. Indeed, the chaos of Republicans’ first two days in the House majority is really a battle over which faction will rule their future. 

“I’m not surprised we had a deadlock today. But the question tomorrow is do you start to see cracks in the McCarthy coalition with people saying, ‘We need to find someone else; this isn’t going to happen’?” asks Matt Glassman, a Congress expert at Georgetown University. Mr. Glassman suspects that Republicans who have an interest in doing real committee work – who are more likely to be McCarthy supporters – will become more restless the longer the speakership vote continues to freeze any other congressional activity.

“If the House wasn’t organized for a month, I’m not sure a lot of these rebels would care. And that’s why they have so much leverage right now. They can hold out longer.”

Alex Brandon/AP

Rep. Kevin McCarthy (right) talks with Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio (left) and Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, as the House meets for a second day to elect a speaker and convene the 118th Congress, Jan. 4, 2023. After six ballots, the House adjourned with no speaker.

Two days of voting ... so far

Going into the first vote on Tuesday, Mr. McCarthy seemed to be relying on a projection of sheer resolve, vowing to fight on for as many rounds as it took and hoping his opponents would eventually fall into line. He even took the step of moving into the speaker’s office over the weekend. 

On the first ballot, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries earned all 212 Democratic votes, while Mr. McCarthy won 203 from his own caucus – far short of the 218 he needed to win, with 19 GOP defections. Most of those Republican votes went for Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs, one of the leaders of the anti-McCarthy movement, while Ohio Republican Jim Jordan, a founding member of the Freedom Caucus and a McCarthy supporter, came in second with six votes. 

With no person receiving a majority, the clerk announced that the House would follow the precedent from the last time that happened: in 1923, when a small group of Republicans forced Massachusetts Rep. Frederick Huntington Gillett to face nine rounds of voting before he eventually won the speakership. There have been 13 other multiple-ballot speaker elections, all before the Civil War – the longest, in 1855, lasted two months, with 133 rounds of votes. 

On the second ballot, the 19 anti-McCarthy voters coalesced around Mr. Jordan, despite the congressman giving a speech in favor of Mr. McCarthy before the voting resumed. On the third ballot, Mr. Jordan picked up an additional vote, from Florida Rep. Byron Donalds, who had previously backed Mr. McCarthy.

When the House reconvened Wednesday for a fourth ballot, all 20 anti-McCarthy votes went to Representative Donalds, and Rep. Victoria Spartz voted present. A fifth ballot played out the same way. On the sixth, Rep. Kat Cammack of Florida proclaimed it “Groundhog Day,” as she nominated Mr. McCarthy, again. That vote concluded with the same result.

“This is what happens when a number of people get elected who would rather pontificate on TV than govern, which is what they were elected to do,” says GOP pollster Whit Ayres. “Their mindset will not change once there is a speaker,” he adds, “because they don’t view government as part of their job.” 

Mr. McCarthy’s opponents were unswayed by the urging of former President Trump, who on Wednesday put out a statement calling on all Republican members to “VOTE FOR KEVIN,” adding, “DO NOT TURN A GREAT TRIUMPH INTO A GIANT & EMBARRASSING DEFEAT.” 

The congressman from Bakersfield, whom Mr. Trump infamously referred to as “my Kevin,” was loyal throughout the Trump presidency. That ardent support briefly wavered after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, when Mr. McCarthy rebuked the president publicly and privately, but he later fell back in line.

McCarthy’s résumé

Over his eight-term tenure, Mr. McCarthy has held nearly every leadership position in Congress aside from speaker. He ran in 2015 after Mr. Boehner resigned, but withdrew from the race less than a month later and Mr. Ryan was elected. 

Long a skilled fundraiser, he brought in hundreds of millions of dollars for Republican candidates in 2022 – funds that the then-minority leader sometimes earmarked for primary candidates who were more likely to support him in his upcoming speakership bid. But Mr. McCarthy’s leadership PAC also donated money to 17 of his 20 detractors. Indeed, Mr. McCarthy has also been criticized for not playing “hardball” with some of these same members.

Some McCarthy opponents characterized their votes as a principled stand against a transactional politician whom they could not trust to hold the line on spending or any other conservative priorities. Rep. Chip Roy gave a floor speech to this effect on Tuesday, saying that his opposition to Mr. McCarthy was not personal, but that supporting his candidacy was equivalent to supporting “the swamp” of elites in Washington. His goal, he said, was to change the way Washington works.

Still, some veteran observers also detected a personal animus behind the standoff. 

“When it’s tight margins, all politics is personal,” says political strategist John Feehery, who served as press secretary to former Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois. “There’s definitely going to be some personal animosity ... that is beyond the ideological and that complicates things.” 

To that point, Mr. McCarthy almost completely conceded to the list of his opponents’ demands, including agreeing that members would have at least 72 hours to read legislation before voting, establishing a committee to investigate the “weaponization of government” by the Biden administration, and a plan to address government spending. 

Mr. McCarthy even partially agreed to a longtime demand of far-right Republicans on the “motion to vacate.” For centuries, only one House member was needed to force a no-confidence vote against their speaker – a threat that led to the exit of former Republican Speaker Boehner but hasn’t been used in practice for more than a century. In 2019, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi changed that rule by requiring either a party’s majority or a party leader to initiate such a vote, but Mr. McCarthy’s opponents want to return to the old practice. Mr. McCarthy at first resisted but then proposed setting a “motion to vacate” bar at five members. 

Yet despite those concessions, his detractors have refused to budge – leading some Republicans to question their motives.

“It is a populist mindset that is ‘anti, anti, anti,’ but they aren’t for anything that they can articulate,” says Mr. Ayres. “It’s the same mindset that gave us Brexit: ‘We don’t have any idea about what we’re going to do about all the problems that would follow, but we are going to blow it up anyway.’” 

Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has at times initiated her own kinds of chaos in the House and has been aligned with some of the McCarthy detractors on other issues, rebuked those colleagues to reporters Tuesday evening. 

“It’s not who we like and who we don’t like, because you want to know something? That is the failure of Republicans,” said Ms. Greene. “The Republicans are the party of never. It’s always ‘never’ when they don’t like somebody.” 

Andrew Harnik/AP/File

House Speaker John Boehner stands with his successor, Rep. Paul Ryan, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Oct. 29, 2015. Both Mr. Boehner and Mr. Ryan left the speakership, and the House, after being unable to work with the GOP’s far-right flank.

Who can hold out longer?

Whenever a new speaker is eventually chosen, he or she will have somewhat limited power given the divided Congress, with Democrats controlling the Senate.

But there will be issues of national consequence that Congress will be forced to address – such as the debt ceiling deadline this fall, an issue that will undoubtedly animate these Republican divides.

“If you can’t elect a speaker, how can you come up with a deal on the debt limit?” says Mr. Feehery. “I don’t think the expectations were too high that that much legislation will happen this session, but right now they are lowering expectations even further.”

Some members say this prolonged speakership battle has already hurt the next leader – and the party as a whole. 

“These shenanigans that they have pulled have certainly weakened us,” Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas tells the Monitor. “That seems obvious.” 

Others say whoever ultimately rises out of the ashes may have demonstrated they have the fortitude to succeed. Pennsylvania Rep. Matt Cartwright, a Democrat, says it all depends on how the gavel is ultimately won.

“I can think of two scenarios,” he says, standing a few feet from the House floor. “First, a charismatic natural leader emerges from the GOP conference and is able to attract [votes] by force of personality and goodwill. If that were to happen, that would be a very strong, capable, and effective speaker. The second possibility I’m thinking of is where one of the usual suspects makes all sorts of concessions to the left and the right and ends up quite hobbled.”

He notes that the last two Republican speakers, Mr. Boehner and Mr. Ryan, fell into the latter category. 

“And they hated being a speaker. Both of them.”

Lehtikuva/Jussi Nukari/Reuters

The vessel FSRU Exemplar, a floating liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal chartered by Finland to replace supplies of gas from Russia, is docked at the port in Inkoo, Finland, Dec. 30, 2022. The floating storage and regasification unit will serve both the domestic and Baltic markets as Europe grapples with an energy crisis.

This was supposed to be the West’s winter of energy discontent.

After Russia invaded Ukraine, world oil prices soared and Moscow choked off almost all the natural gas that it fed to Europe. But the resulting energy crisis did not go as Russian President Vladimir Putin planned.

Far from splintering the West, the war has united it. Oil prices have retreated, a current warm spell is easing demand, and natural gas from Qatar and the United States is flooding into Europe, making this winter – while still very difficult and expensive for the continent – more manageable so far than many could have imagined when war broke out last February.

The war has also united the world around the idea that energy security is paramount. It remains integral to geopolitics and can trump climate worries. In the process, the war has revealed hard truths about the role of energy in the world economy. If 2022-23 turns out to be a winter of discontent, it may well have as much to do with facing up to those hard truths as with the energy shortages themselves.

“We need to get through 2023,” says James Henderson, a Russia expert at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies in Britain. “We need to make sure that the world is a secure place in terms of energy. And then we need to hope that the catalyst that we’ve seen towards making plans for [a green energy] transition really starts to come through and people start to put plans into practice.”

Perhaps the bitterest truth to swallow – for climate activists and energy companies alike – is that energy security is not an either-or proposition. Analysts say it will require both the production and delivery of more and dirtier fossil fuel in the short term and a speeded-up transition to greener energy in the long term. 

This shift in thinking is most palpable in Europe, which has become ground zero in this energy-security conundrum.

In May, less than three months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the European Commission published its plan to wean the European Union off of Russian energy by 2027.

In the short term, it outlined investments in infrastructure to handle imports of gas and in some cases postponements in the phaseout of nuclear and coal power. Even Germany, a leader in green energy, plans to lease five floating terminals to receive imports of liquefied natural gas in the short term and to build at least one permanent land-based gas terminal. Its first floating terminal, at Wilhelmshaven, is finished and could receive its first LNG shipment this month.

Michael Probst/Reuters

A truck parks at a gas station in Frankfurt, Germany, Oct. 13, 2022. Drivers in the U.S. and Europe have gotten a break from the sky-high pump prices they experienced early in 2022. But the price tag is still difficult for many customers who have been enduring relentless inflation and were used to lower prices.

“Europe’s governments and its industry have acted remarkably well in handling and coordinating this emergency this winter and planning for an orderly phase-out thereafter,” writes Henning Gloystein, director of energy, climate, and resources for Eurasia Group, in an email. “This has been hugely costly, but it has worked better than anyone expected it could have. It’s certainly worked in ways Moscow seemed unable to imagine.” 

Of course, such moves also represent a large blow for the world movement to curb greenhouse gas emissions. China as well as emerging nations priced out of the oil and gas markets have increased their use of coal, which emits even more carbon dioxide. These moves are already having their effect. The world consumed more coal last year than ever before, the International Energy Agency (IEA) reported last month.

Investing in solar, wind, geothermal

But the same shortages that are forcing nations to continue investing in fossil fuel infrastructure are also pushing them to accelerate their transitions to green energy in the long term. The EU, which already had ambitious green energy transition goals, now plans to accomplish those goals in three years rather than 10. By 2027, the continent will generate more than half of its electricity from renewables, the IEA forecasts. By 2030, Rystad Energy estimates the EU’s capacity to generate geothermal heat for office buildings, housing, and so forth will rise 58% at a cost of $7.4 billion.

The efforts to accelerate investment in renewables go beyond Europe, encompassing other key nations from China and India to the United States, where the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act gives a big new boost to clean energy.

The investments don’t put the world – or even Europe – on track to meet Paris Agreement goals for decarbonization. But the continent is at the forefront of a meaningful shift.

“Europe is definitely the global leader in energy transition,” says Pavel Molchanov, research analyst for Raymond James Equity Research, based in Charlotte, North Carolina. It leads in solar energy, electric vehicle adoption, even offshore wind, he adds. “Europe by the end of this decade will have maybe 10 times more offshore wind than the United States.”

Andreas Schebesta/The smarter E Europe//news aktuell/AP

A solar promotion tied to The Smarter E conference on energy in Europe. Solar manufacturers and service providers meet in Munich every year to explore latest developments. In Europe's push to expand renewable energy, one focus is on hybrid facilities where both solar and wind power are produced.

Pragmatism on fossil fuels

Another hard truth is that in global energy markets there are no pariahs. The Ukraine war and consumer worries about supply shortages raising energy prices have made it harder for environmentalists to cast the big oil and gas companies as villains. Investment banks, which a year ago were pledging to phase out funding for fossil fuel investments around the world, have changed their tune. 

“I wouldn’t quite say that the hydrocarbon industry is back, but I think there’s a level of realism, if you like, about the role of hydrocarbons and how long that role will continue,” says Dr. Henderson of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. 

Even Russia, which earned nearly worldwide opprobrium for its Ukraine invasion, can’t become a pariah when it comes to energy. The world needs its energy too much. One sign of this realization is the West’s new exception to its ban on Russian oil: a price cap. As long as buyers spend no more than $60 to buy a barrel of Russian oil, the G7 industrial nations will allow the world’s insurance companies to insure the tanker ship – an important consideration for any oil shipper. Since almost all the major insurers are located in the West, the cap has teeth.

But at $60, the cap does little. Russia is already selling its Urals crude for less than that to clients like China and India. And it continues to turn a profit, allowing President Putin to keep funding his war effort. While some nations pushed for a much lower cap to punish Moscow, leading nations of the EU as well as the United States wanted the higher limit to balance geopolitical aims with economic realities. 

“The policy has been watered down to make sure that Russia continues to sell oil on the global market,” says Mr. Molchanov of Raymond James. “Otherwise, we’re going to have energy shortages around the world, which nobody wants to see.”

The squeeze on Russia

The reverse is also true: Moscow needs the West to buy its energy exports, which provide the Russian government about half its revenues. Russia has found success exporting its oil to Asia, notably to China and India. And the Putin government has threatened to cut its oil production and to refuse to sell to any nation that abides by the cap. If oil prices rise this year, as many expect, he may well test the West’s willingness to enforce that cap. But the early signs are that Moscow is bowing to economic realities and working with oil importers abiding by the cap, says Mr. Gloystein of Eurasia Group.

A drop in Russian oil production may be inevitable as Western oil firms remove their investment and know-how from Russian energy projects and China and India don’t take up all the slack. Analysts say Moscow may be forced to cut its oil production perhaps 15% this year because of fewer customers.

Russia’s natural gas outlook looks even more dire. It’s doubtful China will ever come close to importing the amounts of Russian gas that Europe did before the Russia-Ukraine war, Mr. Gloystein says. The gas shut-off “is painful for Europe, but it’s much more painful for Russia,” he adds.

All this leaves Mr. Putin with his own hard truth. Even should he pull off some kind of military victory in Ukraine, he has scared off most of the customers for Russia’s preeminent export, ruined his nation’s reputation as a reliable supplier of natural gas, and pushed his oil industry down a road of potential long-term decline.

Russia’s economy is diversified enough – and its people resourceful enough – to perhaps avert outright disaster. But the chill winds of economic winter may persist far longer in Russia than in the West.

Volunteers have now tracked down at least one photo for every one of the more than 58,000 U.S. military service members who died in the Vietnam War – for an online Wall of Faces project that took more than two decades to complete.

The goal was to help a new generation of Americans grapple with sacrifice and inspire them to reflect, perhaps, on “why we have a wall” with names inscribed on it, say organizers from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund (VVMF), the nonprofit that spearheaded the digital project as well as the national monument on which all these names are engraved.

More than half of the visitors to the memorial in Washington, D.C., today weren’t alive when it was commissioned in 1982, they add.

Over the years the picture-gathering process could be fraught: Relatives were sometimes reluctant to share photos of loved ones killed in battles picked by a government their survivors had come to distrust.

And stock photos taken straight out of, say, boot camp graduation can be surprisingly tough to come by. “The military doesn’t just sit there and funnel pictures to you,” says Herb Reckinger, a volunteer. 

So tracking them down often involved investigative dedication, reaching out to local librarians, scouring yearbooks, and, at one point, combing through microfiche for a grainy image of a high schooler orphaned and homeless before he was drafted. 

The project evolved into a quest, too, for photos that were actually good – meaning they showed a little personality, says Tim Tetz, director of outreach at VVMF. 

Seeing young people in their prime, before they were soldiers, kicking back on a beach, cradling a newborn niece, or “sitting through that awkward school photo where their mom made them wear a funny sweater gets you to realize that they went through the same milestones and moments that each of us have gone through and really brings the sacrifice home,” he says. “You see the impact this war had on so many.” 

Along the way, Mr. Tetz adds, the project “has provided some healing we didn’t envision when we started.” 

from Wall of Faces website

An image from the Wall of Faces website created by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund. The group has reached its goal of obtaining photos of each member of the armed services killed during the war in Vietnam, putting faces to all the names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.

One volunteer’s journey

When Mr. Reckinger, a retired oil refinery worker with a midwesterner’s disarming niceness, started volunteering for the Wall of Faces project, there were roughly 300 Minnesotans killed in the war without a picture on their VVMF profile. 

He pasted a state map on cardboard and hung it on the wall with sticky notes marking their hometowns. Occasionally making “two or three trips for one guy,” since 2014 he’s dug through local historical society archives and teamed up with librarians to track down photos for 250 soldiers lost in the war. 

Mr. Reckinger drew a “very low” draft lottery number for the Vietnam War, “but I joined the Navy Reserve for 5 or 6 years so as not to get drafted – I’m not extremely proud of it,” he says.  

He’s one of a couple of dozen volunteers who spent several hours a day, and sometimes more, hunting for photos in Minnesota and, when that job was done, other states, joining a band ultimately totaling thousands of volunteers who helped in the collection effort.

Now that the project is complete, their job has evolved into finding more and better photographs for each of the names inscribed on the wall. “I always felt that the Vietnam soldiers deserved better,” Mr. Reckinger says. “I’m trying to see what a 70-year-old guy sitting in his basement can do.”

It turns out to be a fair amount. After the photos of one New York state soldier lost in Vietnam were destroyed in a 2009 fire at his mother’s home, Mr. Reckinger helped track down a relative and found an image.

Then there was David Kern, a Minnesotan who dropped out of 10th grade before school photo day. He’d left two foster homes and was sleeping in local sheds and cars. 

He was taken in by a local family and “turned his life around” before he died in Vietnam. Mr. Reckinger, working with a local historian, was able to find a grainy photo from an obituary. “It’s one of the poorest-quality pictures you’ll ever see,” he says.

Still, Mr. Kern’s remembrance page on the wall – which gives biographical information and has room for viewers’ comments – has attracted dozens of notes of thanks from local students and fellow veterans. “You deserved to have a family,” one child wrote.

Surfacing deep feelings

Not all family members have been thrilled to be asked for photos of their loved ones. “Some would be very angry: ‘You can’t do this – we didn’t support the war,’” Mr. Tetz says. “It took us a long time to get them to work with us and understand we’re not the government and this is the purpose of what we want to do.”

That purpose is to memorialize, and also create community, he says. On one Wall of Faces remembrance page, a brother recalls ironing his shirt when Corporal Raymond Powell – who enlisted in the Marines at age 17 by taping sand-filled socks to his body to make minimum weight requirements – came home on leave. “I burned myself trying to look good for you,” Warfus Powell Jr. wrote in 2021. 

A helicopter crew member posted a picture last year of the tiger that killed Corporal Gerald Olmsted – one of three casualties of war caused by big cats. 

For Jacqueline Smith, who lost her big brother Richard Fina in 1968, the photos hammer home that these were “such young men,” she says. 

In his last letter to his family, he signed off, “Don’t worry about me. I’m a devout coward.” He wasn’t – he was a medical corpsman killed by a sniper while providing aid to fellow servicemen who’d been shot.

His 51-person platoon had recently been whittled down to 13. 

When Mr. Reckinger reached out to Ms. Smith for a photo of her brother, it wasn’t easy, she says. “I was 18 when he died, and you put it in a special place. It’s kind of hard to come back to that after you deal with it so many years ago.” 

But Mr. Reckinger “did it in such a wonderful way,” she says. “I just keep thinking my mother would have been so tickled with the recognition. 

“If it wasn’t for the picture, it would just be another name – you read about him and think, ‘Oh, that’s sad,’” she adds. “But you look at their young faces, and it just means so much.” 

AP

Croatia's Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic and Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, inspect euro coins in Zagreb, Croatia, Jan. 1.

Few people around the world noticed a milestone for Europe on New Year’s Day. Not so in Ukraine. People there watched as the small country of Croatia entered the inner sanctum of the European Union, joining both the single-currency eurozone and the Schengen Zone – the passport-free area across 27 countries. And this comes only a decade after Croatia was granted general EU membership.

With a recent history similar to Ukraine’s – war with neighbors, high-level corruption, and post-Soviet meddling by Russia – Croatia is seen in Ukraine as a model for joining the EU, especially since June when Ukraine was made an official candidate for membership.

The war in Ukraine, which will soon enter its second year, has not only affirmed a strong democratic identity among Ukrainians, but also pushed them to gain a higher concept of security than just a military victory over Russia. Croatia “is valuable for us because one day we, too, will have to go down our own path of post-war transformation in order to rebuild the country and eventually join the club of developed states,” wrote Nazar Zabolotny, an analyst at the Joint Action Center, in the publication Yevropeyska Pravda.

The strength and power of the EU lies in its “values and principles,” as European Parliament President Roberta Metsola told another potential EU candidate, Moldova, in November as that nation also tries to ward off Russian meddling. According to the International Crisis Group, the EU welcomes European countries “where institutions work reliably, leaders govern cleanly, and sovereign neighbors treat one another with generosity and respect.”

Through three democratic revolutions – in 1990, 2004-2005, and 2014 – Ukrainians have found national unity based on such civic principles, giving them the stamina to rebel against Russian forces and the desire to align with Europe’s other democratic states, perhaps even to join NATO someday as an external protector.

Croatia’s journey into the EU and the eurozone required dealing with high-level corruption – such as the conviction of a former prime minister, Ivo Sanader – as well as achieving better financial discipline. Croatia also recognized its responsibility in regard to war criminals, a problem for many states in the former Yugoslavia caught up in the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s.

That journey may also explain why the Croatian soccer team took third place in the 2022 World Cup, a feat duly noted in Ukraine despite the distraction of war. Security for a nation is more than missiles and ammunition.