While we’re all still celebrating the ascendant victory of Mike Johnson to the position of Speaker of the House, we’re hearing that the talk in DC is still revolving around the intrigue that got us to the point of needing a new speaker in the first place.

Let’s take a second to look back at the winding path that brought about this historic win for Louisiana Conservatives.

It all started almost a year ago when Republicans (led by prolific campaigner Steve Scalise, who headed up much of the party’s election apparatus) took back the House from the clutches of Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats. With this transfer of power, the GOP had the opportunity to elect a new Speaker of the House.

At the start of the new Congress, then-Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy threw his hat in the ring as the choice for Speaker. It was clear after days of threatening members and forcing votes on the floor of the House that the California Republican did not have enough support to win the position outright. Most self-aware statesmen working for the good of the country would recognize that after perhaps the 8th or 9th try, it was not their time and that they should pass off the torch to someone else – but not our Kevin.

He pressed on, with the help of his “assistant coach,” Garret Graves, and successfully thwarted all other challengers from gaining support. Graves became an invaluable asset to McCarthy by his ability to scuttle his fellow Louisianian Steve Scalise’s chances of being Speaker – even though many in Congress will tell you that he alone had broad support and would have sailed through an election to Speaker.

Although it took 15 votes (an unprecedented number of failures), Kevin was able to beg, borrow, and steal his way to the gavel.

In the process, however, he gave away a key procedural change that would end up being his downfall – the one-person motion to vacate (meaning that the Speaker of the House could be removed by one vote of the Congress)

By agreeing to this and many other rule changes, Kevin McCarthy became the weakest Speaker of the House in US history and effectively signed his own proverbial death warrant.

Fast forward to this fall – with two wars underway around the globe and Biden running the country into the ground, Matt Gaetz exercised that new motion to vacate and ended McCarthy’s speakership.

In a recent episode of Steve Bannon’s War Room Podcast, Congressman Matt Gaetz gave an inside look at the battle for Speaker that most outside of the Beltway don’t normally get.

“It was McCarthy who was working to knife Scalise.”

After Kevin McCarthy was stripped of his gavel and the title of Speaker, he became, as Gaetz said, “a desperate man trying to cling to power…”

Rather than work for the good of the country, he began to connive in the background in the hopes of ruining anyone who was actually supported by the caucus.

Again, with McCarthy out, it became apparent that Scalise would be the likely choice for elevation, but Kevin could not let this happen. Just as he had done in January, he enlisted Graves as his hatchet-man.

Sources have told us that it was Garret Graves who made calls around the Congress spreading deplorable rumors about Leader Scalise, and it was Graves who used radical Louisiana democrat talking points to convince representatives like Nancy Mace to play the “racist card” – a claim that even Louisiana Democrat Cedric Richmond has denounced.

Though many saw through Kevin’s sad attempts to retain power, he and Graves were able to spread enough division in order to stop Scalise from gaining the gavel.

Graves continued to show his true colors when he invited a cadre of his goons to the Speaker’s balcony to celebrate the character assassination of his fellow Louisiana congressman. He also invited Louisiana Congresswoman Julia Letlow (whom he has been friends with for years dating back to his work with her late husband together in the Jindal administration). Graves, drunk with arrogance, used this time to humiliate Congresswoman Letlow in front of her colleagues due to her support of Scalise for Speaker, insisting that he and Kevin held the real power in DC.

Well, as the good book says, “Pride comes before a fall,” and Graves, McCarthy, and their crew would be in for an epic fall just a few short days after that cocktail party.

With the office of Speaker still unoccupied, candidates began to rise one after another. At one point, there were over five announced candidates for Speaker, but after much deliberation, it looked like Minnesota Representative Tom Emmer would be the choice.

This consensus didn’t last, however, as Rep. Emmer bowed out mere hours after securing the nomination – showing that he did not have the true backing of the caucus.

After Emmer’s almost immediate withdrawal from the Speaker’s race, freshman Representative Mark Molinaro (R-NY) brilliantly suggested a nonbinding poll of where member’s votes would lie on the no. 2 man— Mike Johnson. Molinaro moved to waive the rules through a unanimous vote, but the one and only Kevin McCarthy couldn’t let this happen, immediately jumping up and screaming his objection.

Quite fairly, this blew away not only Mike Johnson, who has supported McCarthy countless times, all in an effort to unify the House Republicans.

As Gaetz put it, this was the catalyst for the Republican party revealing who Kevin McCarthy has always been and is: a self-serving backstabber. McCarthy had, up until that point, been successful in squashing other candidates to make way for his impossible return— but it didn’t last long.

Johnson, now wise to the game being played, called for the write-in votes (utilized by McCarthy to dole out promises for support) to be a roll-call vote instead. Out of the 43 votes McCarthy received from these write-ins, not a single Republican was able to stand up and admit to supporting a dividing force like McCarthy.

It seems like just dessert that Kevin McCarthy and his goons were finally put in their place after weeks of causing fracture and dissent among the Republican House, thereby putting the nation in a dangerous limbo state.

Perhaps McCarthy could learn a thing or two from Rep. Scalise and the respect he has gained from being a strong and selfless member of Congress. Scalise not only recognized that McCarthy would never let him get the votes necessary for speakership and stepped down but also continued to dispense advice and counsel to his fellow House members about their next course of action.

Although Scalise did not reach the pinnacle of the People’s House, we have to think there is some satisfaction that, in the end, Anti-McCarthy and Graves forces won out. It’s almost poetic that the man to take the gavel is a strong conservative ally of Steve Scalise, who also hails from the Bayou State.

Despite all their attempts, Graves and McCarthy could not stop Louisiana leadership from winning over the hearts and minds of Congress and the country.