Kevin McCarthy’s humiliation, and that of Donald Trump alongside him, offers a tall draft of schadenfreude. At the end of that, though, the nation is left with an empty glass and a bitter taste.

For many reasons, McCarthy is unfit for the speakership: He undermined the 2020 election, he is dishonest, he is (as we see) unable to marshal his caucus. But his defectors aren’t really interested in a speaker who is able to keep the House organized or functional, and their ability to hold Congress hostage while attempting to achieve it is a flashing red light for the country.

One can draw some very general conclusions about the anti-McCarthy clique: Its members are mostly far to the right, and they are mostly very pro-Trump, notwithstanding their disagreement on this issue with Trump, who supports McCarthy. All but two of them are election deniers, The Washington Post noted.

[David A. Graham: Kevin McCarthy’s loyalty to Trump got him nothing]

But the dispute in place here is not fundamentally ideological, as Jonathan Chait writes, or at least not in traditional terms. This isn’t a simple question of conservative versus moderate. If it were, Marjorie Taylor Greene wouldn’t be one of McCarthy’s most fiery defenders in this battle. Rather, the divide is about whether the House should be able to accomplish anything at all, and whether the GOP caucus will be bound by political reality. Greene’s presence on the McCarthy side indicates that she has a more realistic theory of governance and power, which says a lot about her counterparts here.

Today, in nominating McCarthy on the fourth round of balloting, Representative Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin said, “There are things I want that I know are impossible to get done in this Congress,” but argued that McCarthy was best-positioned to achieve what was possible. But the rebels start from a premise that nothing is impossible if they’re simply dedicated enough to the cause. They believe they can wrestle the Senate and the White House into submission through force of will. The changes they seek might effectively prevent the House from doing anything, but they don’t see that as a problem; stasis and refusal are tools of hard-core conservatism in their hands.

McCarthy is not an ideologue. He is, at heart, a transactional politician who thrives on relationships. When the rebels rise in the chamber and aver that their disagreement with McCarthy is not personal, they can be both sincere and at the same time spurning him in sharply personal terms, because that is what he is. He has already tried to win them over by offering concessions on some demands, including the number of representatives needed for a motion to vacate, which could force a vote on ejecting the speaker at any time. (It would also gut ethics investigations.) These concessions would make McCarthy a weak speaker if he were able to win the chair, which it appears he cannot. Watching McCarthy try to bargain with them has been darkly humorous, because dealing is in McCarthy’s blood but they are fundamentally anti-deal, whether with Democrats or with him. That is, in fact, their core precept.

The overwhelming majority of the Republican caucus sided with McCarthy, at least at the start of this process. But this is not to say that the rest of the GOP is innocent of the rebels’ kind of thinking. Since 2011, congressional Republicans as a whole have slumped toward the belief that simply sticking to their guns is enough. Much like Donald Trump, the rebels are both continuous with recent trends in the Republican Party but also a break from them, in terms of their zealotry.

[Read: The humiliation of Kevin McCarthy]

No example is more clear than the debt ceiling, an odd, vestigial limit on the nation’s borrowing power. It doesn’t actually affect spending; Congress decides what to spend and then has to pay for that (or borrow), regardless of where the debt limit is set. Refusing to borrow to pay that debt would simply put the nation in default. But Republicans—including McCarthy—have repeatedly voted against raising the debt ceiling anyway, claiming that that would somehow constrain spending, or tried to use it as a backdoor method to enact massive spending cuts.

The debt ceiling is one reason the outcome of this speaker vote matters: The new Congress will have to raise the debt limit or else produce a default sometime in the next few months. McCarthy has been unable to satisfy either the rebels, who want no surrender, or his moderates, who want no part of an economic catastrophe. “Is he willing to shut the government down rather than raise the debt ceiling?” Representative Ralph Norman of South Carolina, one rebel, said today. “That’s a nonnegotiable item.”

But whatever McCarthy’s particular weaknesses, any speaker will face the same quandary. That might be true even of legislators with better conservative bona fides, such as current House Majority Whip Steve Scalise; at least one McCarthy dissident said he wouldn’t vote for anyone who’d been in leadership for the past decade. Whether McCarthy or someone else, the next speaker will not only need 218 votes; he or she will also need a miracle.

For the second day in a row, Kevin McCarthy has failed to gain enough support to become speaker of the US House of Representatives, keeping the country’s lawmakers at a standstill.

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) speaks on the House floor ahead of the latest vote for House speaker, chastising former President Donald Trump for supporting Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) for the speakership. CNN political commentator Alyssa Farah Griffin discusses.

CNN's political panel discusses Rep. Chip Roy's (R-TX) nomination of Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) for House speaker as Rep. Donalds votes for himself for House speaker, while Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) appears to suffer another defeat in the 4th round.

Republican Kevin McCarthy is seeking to become Speaker, one of the most powerful roles in US politics.

As House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy struggles to secure votes within his party to secure speakership of the chamber, he has tapped a longtime Republican lawmaker to quietly try and lock down votes among the GOP holdouts.

Republican leader Kevin McCarthy remains defiant in bid for House speaker as lawmakers prepare for further ballots.

Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers and Jimmy Kimmel poked fun at Republican leader Kevin McCarthy who failed to secure the speaker's gavel after three rounds of voting on January 3.

CNN's Kaitlan Collins talks to Republican Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL) about former President Donald Trump telling House Republicans to vote for Kevin McCarthy to be Speaker of the House in a social media post.

Shortly before 4 p.m.yesterday, Kevin McCarthy, the man who desperately wanted to be House speaker, had just suffered two brutally public rejections in a row. For some reason, he was unbowed. “We’re staying until we win,” McCarthy assured a crush of reporters waiting for him outside a bathroom in the Capitol.

Moments earlier, McCarthy had sat and watched as a small but dug-in right-wing faction of his party twice defied his pleas for unity and ensured the 57-year-old Californian’s ignominious place in congressional history. Trying to avoid the first failed speaker vote in 100 years, McCarthy could afford to lose only four Republicans in the crucial party-line tally that opens each new Congress and allows the majority party to govern. McCarthy lost 19. The clerk called the roll again, and once again 19 Republicans voted for someone other than McCarthy. By the hyperpolarized standards of the modern Capitol, this was a rout.

Outside the bathroom, McCarthy explained how the votes would wear down his opposition, how they’d come to see that there was no viable alternative to him. He pointed out that the Republican whom all 19 of his detractors had backed on the second ballot, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, didn’t even want the speaker’s job and was supporting him. “It’ll change eventually,” McCarthy said.

He walked back to the floor and watched as the House rejected him a third time, now with 20 Republicans casting their votes for Jordan. When the chamber adjourned for the day at about 5:30 p.m., McCarthy had already left the floor, his latest bid for speaker thwarted at least momentarily, and perhaps for good.

As the first day of the new congressional term began, McCarthy made a final defiant plea to Republicans inside a private meeting, the culmination of two months’ of negotiating and concessions. The pitch rallied McCarthy’s allies; Representative Ann Wagner of Missouri told me she had never seen him so fiery. But it also “emboldened the other side,” Representative Pete Sessions of Texas told reporters before the votes.

[Read: The Republican majority’s opening debacle]

Expected or not, the failed votes amounted to a stunning humiliation for McCarthy, who in recent days had been projecting confidence not only in word but in deed. More than measuring the speaker’s drapes, he had begun using them: McCarthy had already moved into the speaker’s suite of offices in the Capitol. If the House elects someone besides him in the coming days or weeks, he’ll have to move right back out.

But yesterday was a broader embarrassment for a Republican Party that, at least in the House, has squandered most of the chances that voters have given it to govern over the past dozen years. A day of putative triumph had turned decidedly sour—a reality that many GOP lawmakers, particularly McCarthy supporters, made little effort to disguise. “This costs us prestige,” Sessions lamented after the House had adjourned. “The world is watching.”

What the world saw probably left many viewers confused. Democrats, the party that voters had relegated to the minority, were giddy and celebratory. “Let the show begin!” one exclaimed after the House formally convened. Representative Ted Lieu of California posed outside his office with a bag of popcorn. During the three rounds of ballots, Democrats flaunted their unity, casting with gusto their unanimous votes for the incoming minority leader, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York. “Jeffries, Jeffries, Jeffries!” now-former Speaker Nancy Pelosi exclaimed in the fourth hour of voting.

By that point, the House chamber had lost most of its energy. Lawmakers who had brought their children to witness their swearing-in as members of Congress had sent most of them away; there would be no swearing-in, because that, too, must wait for the election of a speaker. As the third ballot dragged on, a few Republicans seemed on the verge of nodding off, and others grew chippy. “Because I’m interested in governing: Kevin McCarthy,” Representative Bill Huizenga of Michigan snapped when it was his turn to vote again.

McCarthy’s strategy entering the day had been to keep members on the floor, voting again and again, in hopes that his opponents would grow tired, or buckle under pressure from the House Republicans backing him. But when Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, a McCarthy ally, made a motion to adjourn before the fourth vote could be taken, no one put up a fight. “We were at an impasse,” Representative Byron Donalds of Florida, whose defection to Jordan after voting twice for McCarthy might have helped prompt the adjournment, told reporters afterward. “Right now it’s clear Kevin doesn’t have the votes. So what are we going to do? Go down the same road we already saw with [the initial] ballots? It doesn’t make sense.”

After the adjournment, members left for meetings that many hoped would break the stalemate in time for the House to reconvene today at noon. McCarthy was still gunning for the gavel, but his position seemed more precarious than ever. Republicans who had stuck with him for three ballots were openly discussing alternatives. Could Jordan, a fighter even more conservative than McCarthy and closer to Donald Trump, win over GOP moderates? Was Representative Steve Scalise, McCarthy’s deputy, an acceptable alternative? And while some Republicans still proclaimed themselves “Only Kevin,” others suggested that they might be open to someone else. “I’ve learned in leadership roles, never say what you’re never going to do,” Wagner told me before the voting began.

If there was a consensus among Republicans last night, it was that few if any of them had any idea whom they could elect as speaker, or when that would happen. “I think everybody goes in their corner and talks,” Representative Ken Buck of Colorado, a conservative who voted for McCarthy, told reporters. I asked him if there was a scenario in which McCarthy, having lost three votes in a row, could still win. “Oh, absolutely,” he replied. Was that the likeliest scenario? Buck answered just as quickly: “No.”