When asked if he was interested in the gig, Rep. Mac Thornberry, conservative from Texas cattle country, told reporters on the Hill, “I’d rather be a vegetarian.”

This is because the overstuffed 247-member House majority (brilliantly secured in perpetuity by Bush-era electoral gerrymandering) is, like New York in the 1970s or the Washington Nationals right now, essentially ungovernable.

Here are five reasons why only a fool, hero, caretaker (or some combination of all) would want the job Boehner dearly hopes to vacate by month’s end, but can’t.

1. Ted Cruz is running for president. It’s been jokingly said that the Texas tea party god, who often crossed the rotunda to whip up ultra-conservatives against Boehner’s budget deals, is “Speaker Cruz.” He’s lashed Boehner as a sell-out and cheered the 2013 government shutdown, and even with his nemesis gone, Cruz is going to continue to barbecue the GOP “establishment” – i.e. anybody who has a job that requires them to compromise with the White House. And that’s basically the job description.

Moreover, bashing Congress is the mouth-breathing of political discourse, anyone can do it, and often does. At present, the overall Congressional approval rating is about 16 percent – and that’s pretty good, considering it touched high single digits in recent years. Donald Trump, who had no particular beef with McCarthy but is on good terms with Cruz, offered a don’t-let-the-door-hit-you tweet because, you know, why not? “Great, Kevin McCarthy drops out of SPEAKER race. We need a really smart and really tough person to take over this very important job!” he wrote before suggesting his daughter Ivanka take the job.

Presumably, he loves her too much to have been serious.

2. The “catastrophic” 2013 government shutdown didn’t scare the tea party. Boehner, who had a Midwestern plastic salesman’s love for a folksy maxim, was fond of saying that the tea party wing of his party would recede once they had “touched the stove” – by shutting down the government.

Nope. Cruz delivered his celebrated semi-filibuster against Obamacare, and his members scuttled attempts to cut a stopgap deal with the White House. After a 16-day shutdown, the two sides agreed to a short-term funding deal – with polls showing 8 in 10 Americans blamed Republicans for the disruption, with tea party support tanking nationally.

Democrats predicted the GOP would pay a steep price for their recklessness in the 2014 elections. Not only were the wrong, they were historically wrong: Midterms are, by their nature, base elections, so fired-up anti-Obama Republicans romped, picking up nine Senate seats and the majority. They added 13 new members in the allegedly disgraced House, achieving a commanding majority the likes of which hadn’t been seen since Hoover’s day. Instead of touching the stove – they tossed it at Boehner’s head. When Phillip Bump of the Washington Post analyzed the post-shutdown polling, he concluded “if there is a repeat of the government shutdown, how it affects 2016 -- if at all -- is probably impossible to predict.”

3. If you have any chance of winning, you’re automatically the “establishment.” McCarthy is safely in the red zone of any standard definition of “conservative” but to his party’s right wing, he might as well have been King Boehner II. The tea party, fresh off deposing the last speaker, was leery of anybody who followed the pre-ordained lines of succession – despite McCarthy’s reputation as glad-handing bridge builder willing to hear out their complaints. When Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz hopped in the race, he didn’t cite policy objections with McCarthy – or even any specific ideological breach -- but McCarthy’s connection to the prior regime. “You don’t just give an automatic promotion to the existing leadership team; that doesn’t signal change,” he told FOX News after his announcement. “I think they want a fresh face and a fresh new person who’s actually there at the leadership table in the speaker’s role.”

McCarthy didn’t do much to help his cause. His unfathomably ill-advised declaration that the House Benghazi committee existed for the purpose of degrading Hillary Clinton’s “poll” numbers might have been enough to kill his candidacy anyway. But other numbers actually doomed him. The ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus backed little-known Florida Rep. Daniel Webster; Combined with Chaffetz’s handful of backers, that put McCarthy below the 218 votes he needed to get the big job – and the laid-back Bakersfield native was disinclined to bargain for his future with a group of hard-core rebels who would have likely demanded major concessions to back someone they regarded as soft.

4. Paul Ryan doesn’t want to be speaker -- yet. The disciplined House Ways and Means chairman is regarded as his party’s brains and conscience but he’s not quite ready to be its sacrificial leadership lamb. Plus he delivered a passionate pep talk on behalf of his fallen friend McCarthy. The former 2012 vice-presidential candidate isn’t much more conservative that McCarthy, but he’s arguably the one Republican with the national stature to overcome the reflexive insurrection from the right. So far, no good. “While I am grateful for the encouragement I’ve received, I will not be a candidate,” the Wisconsin Republican said in a statement on Thursday.

Why not? A Ryan pal offered this explanation to me: “Because he’s not a f---ing moron.” Translation: Ryan has a real future. No speaker has ever been elected president (Since James Polk in the 1840s, anyway) — and no speaker dragged into ugly budget crises by his strife-stricken party is ever, ever going to be.

That said, Ryan - a devout Catholic with an abiding sense of obligation to his party - would be hard-pressed to turn down the job if, say, 240 House members begged him on bended knee. Until Thursday it seemed unlikely, but my colleague Anna Palmer says Ryan has cancelled a couple of fundraisers over the next few days, so stay tuned.

5. Your best friend will be Nancy Pelosi. The last speaker to really run the place is still a force to be reckoned with, and even with her shrunken cadre of 177 members – the minority leader is in control. Most (if not all) of Pelosi’s people stick with her on any critical vote, especially budget roll-calls, and Boehner has increasingly relied on her to ram through measures his right wing won’t support. That’s proven to be a useful partnership for all involved (Tea party members, ever worried about primary challengers on their right, get to say they fought the good fight but were betrayed).

But there’s a devastating long-term political cost to working closely with Pelosi on these deals – a reviled doyenne of San Francisco liberalism: Conservative activists and the Levin-Hannity-Rush-Coulter talk radio powerhouses will hammer you for being a Republican in Name Only… just like John Boehner.