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By most accounts, Speaker Mike Johnson inherited a House Republican majority in disarray after the sudden ouster of his predecessor last month.

But as Johnson, R-La., tries to rebuild that slim majority, he’s fast running into the same hard-right factions and divisions that Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., was unable to tame. That’s disrupting the party’s agenda, shelving priorities and leaving gnawing questions about any leader’s ability to govern.

This is MAGA in a nutshell.

Many of Trump’s proposals for his second term are surprisingly extreme, draconian, and weird, even for him. Here’s a running list of his most unhinged plans.

Few Democrats would deny that the party must win back working people. Yet one of the party’s long-term conundrums is whether they can pursue ambitious efforts to combat climate change without threatening those very workers’ wages or jobs.

In coming days, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is set to sign a package of bills that would transition the state to 100 percent clean electricity by 2040. The bills — which also include robust provisions for workers — are among the most ambitious efforts undertaken by any state to move toward a carbon-free future in a manner that is actively good for working people. Significantly, Democrats are testing this approach in a swing state in the heart of the industrial Midwest.

A veteran state legislator in Alaska has said that the state needs to introduce taxes to avoid running out of money as oil revenues that the region depends on are declining.

Trump is so far ahead in Iowa polls that some voters in Buffalo, Iowa, a small riverfront community down the Mississippi River from Davenport are starting to feel a bit apathetic about the upcoming caucuses.

"It just seems like it's a done deal," said John McBride, who was walking his two dogs near his house. "It's not even close."

But Trump's lead is also causing some anxiety among those who worry about his general election electability challenges.

...Yet when the Wisconsin Supreme Court hears arguments next week in a widely watched lawsuit arguing that the existing maps fail to meet standards set out in the state constitution, that kind of political engineering will not be the focus.

Instead, much of the debate will center on exactly how to interpret the word “contiguous.” And the map shapes that are likely to get attention have elicited comparisons to Swiss cheese.

Fifty-five of the state’s 99 Assembly districts and 21 of 33 in the Senate contain “disconnected pieces of territory,” according to the most recent petition filed with the state Supreme Court by 19 Wisconsin voters. The suit seeks to have the state’s maps declared unfair and redrawn.

The story behind Heritage’s claim begins in the 19th century, with the passage of a sexual purity law that was interpreted to make it a crime to mail or receive items intended, designed, or adapted for abortion. Exactly what the Comstock Act said or meant, not least when it came to abortion, was unclear at the time it passed. States were then, for the first time, criminalizing abortion early in pregnancy, with life exceptions. Members of Congress seemed unsure whether the act covered “lawful” or medically indicated abortion.

In the years since, courts have interpreted the Comstock Act not as a flat ban on all abortions. By the 1930s, courts were interpreting the law as having a sort of implied health exception that applied to physicians and those transacting with them. No one has mentioned the statute in the context of abortion for decades.

The GOA is an adamant enemy of gun control measures of all stripes, and proudly calls itself the “no compromise” gun lobby. Its surge in lobbying spending reflects one way it has capitalized on the financial and legal problems of the once 5 million-member NRA in the hopes of expanding the GOA’s political clout, say gun experts.

“The GOA was formed in the 1970s because they believed the NRA was too liberal,” said Robert Spitzer, the author of several books on guns and a professor emeritus at Suny Cortland in New York. “True to its creed, the GOA has opposed every manner of gun law and attacked the NRA at every turn.”

Judging from Post editor Sally Buzbee’s introduction to the project, as well as from my own reporting, the paper talked to dozens of survivors and family members and weighed the enormous range of their opinions about this issue to craft the feature. It was so much better than I was expecting that it initially blinded me to the way it was bad. But bad in a kind of routine way: The media, as well as certain kinds of activists, believe we need to be presented with graphic, grisly evidence to grasp what are simply facts. This grisly evidence, they posit, will change hearts and minds.

It will not. Upwards of three-quarters of American voters support almost every commonsense gun law. And we know why political leaders haven’t heeded their call: the gun lobby, and its disgusting political servants. But the Post tried, anyway, with its multimedia “Terror on Repeat” project. I won’t impugn these journalists’ motives. I’ll assume they are good. I’ll just tell you what I saw, and why I would like to spare people seeing the same thing. Especially survivors.

In the near term, lawmakers’ actions bode well for ensuring that agencies and government services stay open and functional, and that government staff don’t experience disruptions to their workflow or paychecks. Much like it has done in the past, however, Congress’ decision to embrace a CR will allow it to simply procrastinate on the challenges of negotiating final spending bills — and merely postpone the possibility of a shutdown until 2024.

Has Donald Trump gone nuts? This is obviously a difficult question to raise about any person, let alone a candidate, who has demonstrated vicious, paranoid, and violent behavior. (A civil trial in a federal court found him guilty of sexual abuse, after all.) So, everything is relative. Still, all the armchair gerontologists parsing every utterance from President Joe Biden, trying to distinguish his congenital stutter from his natural aging, should look at Trump, whose behavior has gone from bad to weird to bizarre. Is he suffering from a palpable form of dementia? I leave that to the medical experts, but I’d implore you to absorb what the 45th president has been saying recently and how it’s even more worrisome than what he’s been saying and doing since he came down the escalator at Trump Towers in 2015.