Katherine Clark names the Democrats’ price to save Kevin McCarthy

Most of the time, the most irrelevant job in Washington is being a member of the House minority.

Unlike in the Senate, over in the House, the minority party has few levers at its disposal.

Instead of governing, you basically wait around for the public to tire of the party in charge so that you and your colleagues can take over the chamber.

But something unusual happened in Washington this week: Suddenly everyone was talking about the possibility that the House Democrats might actually matter…

…that Democrats might be the key to unlocking the crisis of Speaker Kevin McCarthy losing control of his conference.

To recap: The federal government runs out of money in eight days. The first step to completing the annual spending bills is to pass a short term extension, a so-called continuing resolution or CR, to keep the government open while things get sorted out.

The CR is usually the easy step in the process.

But all week McCarthy has tried and failed to pass a CR. He also tried to pass the defense appropriations bill — surely his far-right rebels wouldn’t vote against the Pentagon, right? They did. Twice.

McCarthy has effectively lost his majority. And this is where the Democrats could come in.

McCarthy’s Plan A is to keep crafting new CRs to try and appease the holdouts until he finally secures a majority — you may recall this is how he won the speakership back in January.

But as they watched the chaos on the House floor this week, a bipartisan group started to push another idea: Republicans should band together with Democrats to pass the CR. One way to do this is with a so-called discharge petition that forces a vote.

That remains a distant but still live possibility.

But the even more intriguing role Democrats could play is a little further down the line. The GOP holdouts have repeatedly threatened McCarthy with a vote to remove him as Speaker. And this week Democrats started to think seriously about how they would vote if that comes to pass.

They could all just vote against McCarthy and help the rebels trigger a new speaker election. Nobody really knows which Republican would emerge from that process. Maybe McCarthy could eke out another victory the way he did in January. Maybe someone else pops up to replace him.

But Democrats could also lend their votes and save McCarthy from that fate. Of course, they would only do that at a very steep price.

So is this all just a fever dream of Washingtonians who watched too much “West Wing"? Or is there some role the Democrats could play to bailout the flailing speaker?

Playbook co-author and Deep Dive host Ryan Lizza went up to the Capitol to ask the woman whose job it is to count votes for the Dems: the number two Democratic leader in the House, Minority Whip Katherine Clark.

He stopped by her office in the Capitol on Thursday a few hours after McCarthy’s latest appropriations gambit failed. They talked about what it would take for her to help the Speaker; her ideology — a bit of a mystery, according to some of her colleagues; her leadership style; her mentors; whether she feels bad for McCarthy; and the origins of her scary nickname.