What Republicans did and what it really means A lot of Republicans on Capitol Hill have no use for Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz and the seven others from the Republican caucus whose votes the other day sank Kevin McCarthy’s speakership. MAGA reactionaries lobbing grenades at Democrats is one thing. Lobbing them into the Republican caucus is quite another. As predicted, Republicans are trying to pin McCarthy’s ouster on Democrats. Reality check: It was Gaetz’s resolution. His alone. For reasons including his initiating an impeachment inquiry against President Biden and his reversal on condemning Donald Trump for precipitating a violent insurrection, Democrats saw no benefit in bailing out McCarthy. Now comes the aftermath. Giving McCarthy the boot is not a good look either for Republicans or for the U.S.A. as a whole. After a quick review of the week’s events and Donald Trump’s “burn-the-house-down” antics at his New York trial, Peter Baker (take with a grain of salt) writes that the foundations of our democracy appear shaky both to scholars and average Americans. Also, foreign adversaries are watching closely: Robert M. Gates, the longtime Republican national security official who served as defense secretary for both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama, warned in an essay in Foreign Affairs magazine last week titled “The Dysfunctional Superpower” that both Mr. Putin and President Xi Jinping of China were interpreting America’s troubles in perilous ways. Both leaders, he wrote, are convinced that democracies like the United States “are past their prime and have entered…