Mike Johnson, the Speaker, had declared after the defeat that he would seek no post; whether he will stay in the house at all, he has left vague, says RedState. Tom Emmer took the second place in the party, which UPI alone reports, from CNN. In the Senate, a different method: John Thune as leader and John Barrasso as his second were re-elected, the rest unchanged, though there were senators who wanted the vote put off.

The reasons offered on the winners' lips were these. Jordan promised a fight in the closed room; Scott Fitzgerald publicly proclaimed him the better fighter and communicator; Andy Harris, chairman of what they call the Freedom Caucus, said the team must change. Mike Rulli is said to have stood up and asked what the leaders meant to do with the rest of their time in the majority. Scalise set against all this his experience and his years at the top, by which, he held, the majority could be won back in 2028. The true cause was barer: the defeat, and the inquiries the victors will soon open, against which, the Daily Mail writes, Jordan will be the chief defender of the President and his family. Of the things themselves that turned the people away, the Persian war, the expulsions, the price of bread, the reports say nothing; whether Donald Trump took a hand in the contest is not recorded.

I grant it: it is Roman not to beg after a defeat. After Cannae the fathers neither ransomed the captives nor received the enemy's envoy, and soon they used two generals, Fabius, whom they called the shield of the city, and Marcellus, its sword. On almost the same day the Americans divided the same roles among themselves: the Senate kept the shield, the lower house took up the sword. Nor is this fickleness; it is the judgment of the beaten, who feel that the very battle was lost under a man long skilled at steering.

Yet the ballots teach more than the speeches. Those who had openly praised Scalise's experience chose another in secret; and Scalise's own allies, as the Daily Mail says, privately admitted that Jordan's words were moving the members. So the hidden vote revealed what the open one had hidden. Note this too: the President himself, a few days earlier, as Breitbart and the Daily Wire had reported, had spoken of expulsions grown too harsh and of a bargain with his opponents; the faction proved more stubborn than its prince. Nor are the Democrats gentler: the day after their victory they had begun hiring prosecutors and investigators, as the Washington Examiner reported. The courts will become weapons on both sides, and what we defend today by precedent will one day be a precedent itself.

There is one remedy, and it is not new: let the sword remember whose it is. The leader of a minority has no imperium; he will have auctoritas if he guards the laws of his country and the liberty of his house, none if he guards one man's household. My Agricola learned to walk the road between headlong defiance and degrading servility, free of ambition and of danger; posterity will measure this leader by the same rule. A sword drawn for one man is sheathed with him.