Kevin McCarthy may be ‘okay,’ but is that enough?

They were only trying to help.

A group of House Republican moderates (yes, a few specimens still survive in the wild) met with Kevin McCarthy this week to help him right his listing bid for the speakership. In a show of support, they passed out pro-McCarthy lapel buttons: stars on a field of blue with a red band in the middle that proclaimed, simply, “O.K.”

The letters were meant to signify “Only Kevin,” CNN’s Melanie Zanona reported, as a rejoinder to the Never-McCarthy hard-liners on the right. But the message had an unfortunate double meaning that highlighted the doubts about the always-a-bridesmaid-never-abride candidate for speaker. McCarthy is just that: Okay. As in: not great. Not even above average. Just okay. One can anticipate future pro-McCarthy slogans as the Jan. 3 speaker election approaches:

McCarthy has a knack for garbled messages. If he does succeed in his speakership quest (which is likely, if only for the lack of an alternative), he will earn the distinction of being the first speaker in U.S. history not to speak fluent English.

For eight years, I have been attempting to make sense of his sentences and mostly come up empty.

Deep in his brain there seems to be a syntax scrambler (I’m guessing it was put there by Hunter Biden, or perhaps the Chinese) that causes violent clashes between subjects and objects, nouns and verbs, singular and plural, and past and present.

Now he’s making another lunge for the top job, and words continue to bedevil him. “We’re Christmas season,” he announced this week. We are? He continued: “A talk of the majority right now who wants to put a small continuing resolution to bump all the members up two days before Christmas, to try to vote on a package they cannot read, written by two individuals who will not be here, on spending for the entire government.”

In fairness, the zaniness in McCarthy’s caucus would be enough to scramble the most orderly mind. McCarthy’s lead tormentor is Rep. Andy Biggs (Ariz.), who is mounting a symbolic candidacy for speaker and is part of a bloc of five Never-McCarthy Republicans vowing to deny Mr. O.K. the job.

McCarthy doesn’t have five votes to spare, so he is cutting backroom deals with Republican holdouts that would effectively surrender to right-wingers the power to paralyze the chamber for the next two years.

The latest demand from the holdouts? Immediate impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s secretary of homeland security.

Before the election, McCarthy said he didn’t think anybody in the Biden administration deserved impeachment. But the Biggs band has forced a U-turn. Two weeks after the election, McCarthy threatened Mayorkas with impeachment. Biggs boasted to me and other reporters that it happened only “after he knew that he was facing somebody who was gonna possibly deny him the speakership.”

McCarthy’s flip-flop on the Mayorkas impeachment is just one of many concessions hard-liners are extorting.

A band of Senate conservatives this week tried to rally support behind McCarthy’s latest position, urging GOP colleagues to postpone the negotiations.

Sen. Mike Lee of Utah said he disagreed with the several Republicans who told him “it’ll be too hard for Kevin McCarthy.”

Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) urged a postponement to give “House Republican leadership opportunity to . . . come up with a plan.”

But the Senate band was small: only four lawmakers. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), billed as a participant, was a no-show. A reporter asked if the sparse attendance meant that Senate Republicans are “tacitly admitting that House Republicans just aren’t ready.”

“Umm,” replied Lee, “those who are making that point are not doing so tacitly. They’re doing so explicitly.”

And they’re doing so because they know that an O.K. speaker of the House is not good enough.