Politico:

McCarthy loyalists vow to draw out painful speakership battle

House Republicans' state of emotional limbo is particularly problematic, since they'd otherwise welcome the chance to move quickly on aiding Israel.

Republican lawmakers are scheduled to meet Tuesday evening for another forum on the internal speakership election that's expected to take place on Wednesday, though neither Scalise nor Jordan has the votes to win the speakership on the House floor — and, importantly, McCarthy does not have the votes he'd need either. That emotional limbo is particularly problematic for House Republicans who would otherwise welcome the chance to move quickly on helping Israel beat back weekend attacks by Hamas.

While the conference remains polarized, Duarte joined GOP Reps. Carlos Gimenez and John Rutherford of Florida in making their plans clear during a closed-door House GOP conference meeting Monday night, according to three GOP lawmakers.

Rutherford warned his fellow Republicans that he was prepared to keep voting for McCarthy over and over, suggesting that the former speaker’s still livid supporters are ready to hold out for some time in order to undercut the other candidates.

As many have noted, the war Republicans are focusing on is their internal one. Meanwhile, Kevin McCarthy has asked his allies to not nominate him, but only after disrupting the election for those who are running. Perhaps the beneficiary will be Patrick McHenry, a McCarthy ally.

In any case the fecklessness and petty childishness of Republicans while Biden leads the country is on full display.

New York Times:

Israel-Gaza WarAs Scale of Atrocities Emerges, Biden Condemns Hamas Attacks as ‘Sheer Evil’

Speaking from the White House, President Biden said 14 Americans had been killed during Hamas’s incursions into Israel and that some U.S. citizens were being held hostage.

• President Biden bristled with indignation during his 10-minute address at the White House, appearing as angry as he ever has in public since becoming president. In remarks after speaking with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he denounced the attack as “evil” multiple times. Victims, he said, had been “butchered” and “slaughtered,” and he decried the “bloodthirstiness” of the assailants.

Major speech by a major politician.

David Schenker/Haaretz:

Israel Focused on the Wrong Iranian Threat, With Deadly Results

Israel's fixated on the Iranian nuclear threat while Iranian proxies Hamas and Hezbollah dramatically increased their capabilities

Hamas’ unprecedented attack on Israel is a watershed moment. Not only did the intelligence failure rival that of 1973, the long-term implications of this bloody assault are as consequential as the 1967 war.

One early take away from this outrage is that Israel’s longstanding strategy of “wars between the wars”--the plan to constrain its Iranian proxy adversaries through limited kinetic action--was insufficient…

For more than a decade, Israel’s political and security establishment has been narrowly focused on the threat posed by the Iranian nuclear weapons program. While the IDF periodically targeted Hamas assets and personnel as well as Iranian forward operating positions in Syria, Israel has largely avoided largescale operations against Hamas and Lebanese Hezbollah. The reticence to seriously militarily degrade these terrorist organizations was understandable; an Iranian nuclear weapon is an existential threat, while Hezbollah and Hamas were considered a deadly, but tactical challenge.

Noga Tarnopolsky and Shira Rubin/Washington Post:

Israel massed troops in the West Bank. Then Hamas attacked from Gaza.

Three days after the deadliest attack in Israeli history, with at least 900 dead, the country is on the cusp of a long and bloody war in Gaza. More than 300,000 reservists have been called up to serve. But the capacity of Israel’s military, long revered here as a source of stability, suddenly feels like a question mark. Equally unclear is the end game for Netanyahu — with his Gaza containment strategy in ruins, some are calling for a full reoccupation of the territory…

Aharon Zeevi Farkash, former head of the Israel Defense Forces’ military intelligence branch, told Israeli radio station Reshet Bet that “after we are able to probe this, we will see that we knew almost everything. There were intelligence assessments hours before. The question is, did we understand what we knew?”

Analysts also point to a failure in political leadership. Netanyahu, they contend, allowed military preparedness to erode alongside Palestinian militant escalation as he pursued a contentious plan to weaken Israel’s judiciary — setting off months of furious protests that delighted the country’s adversaries.

This is one of the main reasons Israelis are not giving Netanyahu much leeway. They see him as the architect of unreadiness. The political implications follow.

This echoes the Israeli press, much of which is still paywalled but the New York Times has:

As War Rages, Netanyahu Battles for Reputation and Legacy

The horrors committed by Hamas on Israeli civilians are all but certain to mark Benjamin Netanyahu’s legacy no matter the outcome of the war.

After leading Israel for nearly 16 years in total and priding himself on bringing the country prosperity and security, Mr. Netanyahu, 73, now confronts the vivid failure of his own policies toward the Palestinians — presiding over what many Israelis are calling the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

The Hamas breakout from Gaza and incursion into Israel proper, killing hundreds of civilians as well as soldiers, is all but certain to mark Mr. Netanyahu’s legacy no matter the outcome of the fierce war he now promises against Hamas.

On Tuesday, under pressure to do so, Mr. Netanyahu struggled to try to negotiate a unity government that included some of his main rivals, most of them experienced military officers. But disagreements continued over their demands for a smaller security cabinet to administer the war, which would sideline some of Mr. Netanyahu’s most controversial ministers.

David Rothkopf/Daily Beast:

It’s Dangerous for the U.S. to Give Israel a Blank Check to Assault Gaza

There’s no military solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict. If there were, the attacks of this past weekend would not have happened.

In the wake of atrocities, it is hard to be rational. But the failure of rationality in precisely moments like these that begets future atrocities. It does not help the Israeli people, nor does it advance U.S. interests to “show solidarity” by supporting, defending, or even simply tolerating the bad acts or instincts of the most incompetent, corrupt, and vile government in Israel’s history. Such a position dishonors the victims of Hamas and the rest of the people of Israel if it compounds the crimes with more crimes that make more senseless bloodshed more likely. It is not “loyal” to increase the likelihood of more, not fewer, October 7ths.

Pedro Soriano Mendiara/Agenda Publica:

Israel, the North Star in US Foreign Policy

Israel’s increasing shift to the right, exemplified in 1977 by Likud’s first electoral victory, which also coincided in time with a similar shift in the Republican Party and the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, made the relationship between conservative administrations in the two countries increasingly comfortable, even after the fall of the Soviet Union. In that sense, the attacks of 11 September 2001 and the fight against Islamic jihadism only served to strengthen the ties between the two countries in their struggle against a common enemy.

While Republican administrations supported Israel’s heavy-handed policy towards its adversaries, Democratic administrations tried to get it to reach agreements with them (for instance, the 1978 Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt under President Carter or the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO, negotiated under President Clinton).

This partisan division of labour has become more strained in recent years as the Democratic Party, in particular, has sought to adopt a more critical stance towards its ally (perhaps inevitably, as American Muslims, a traditionally Republican bloc, began to vote Democratic after 9/11 and gained more influence in Democratic administrations) and Israeli governments began to rely on far-right parties to govern. It is well known that relations between Presidents Obama and Biden with the current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were and are very frosty and that the latter’s authoritarian policies, with his attempts to control the Israeli judiciary, are viewed with great concern by the current US administration.

In other news… 

Associated Press:

Former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice advises Republican leader against impeachment

There should be no effort to impeach a liberal Wisconsin Supreme Court justice based on what is known now, a former justice advised the Republican legislative leader who asked him to review the issue.

Some Republicans had raised the prospect of impeaching newly elected Justice Janet Protasiewicz if she did not recuse from a redistricting lawsuit seeking to toss GOP-drawn legislative district boundary maps. On Friday, she declined to recuse herself, and the court voted 4-3 along partisan lines to hear the redistricting challenge.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos had asked three former justices to review the possibility of impeachment. One of those three, David Prosser, sent Vos an email on Friday, seemingly just before Protasiewicz declined to recuse, advising against moving forward with impeachment. That was after a state judiciary disciplinary panel rejected several complaints lodged against Protasiewicz that alleged she violated the judicial code of ethics with comments she made during the campaign.

Satire, folks. Or is it? There are some editors and publishers...

Ian Ward/Politico:

Kevin McCarthy’s Downfall Is the Culmination of the Tea Party

Political scientist Theda Skocpol on how tea party politics laid the foundation for the GOP’s current troubles.

“I’m sitting here looking at a picture on my iPad of the three ‘Young Guns’ from that iconic cover of their book,” she said. “All three of them were felled in succession by the popular anger of the tea party base.”

The tea party that Skocpol was referring to no longer formally exists as a faction in Congress, its erstwhile allies having been subsumed into the far-right Freedom Caucus or into the generic “America First” wing of the GOP. But according to Skocpol, the history of the tea party remains essential to understanding the forces that ultimately led to McCarthy’s political demise.

Cliff Schecter on the Speaker fiasco: