Kakistocracy is a badly underused word which needs to make a major comeback this year, as it is perfectly descriptive of the cabal of loons, clowns, demagogues, crooks and halfwits who are now in charge of the House of Representatives.

The literal definition of the word is a system of government which is run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens. It’s been around for a few hundred years, but overtaken by others perhaps more colorful to describe slimeball government. Kleptocracy, for example, has a real ring to it.

But in surveying the crowd now in charge, who elected Nancy Pelosi for another tour of duty as the Speaker of the House, it’s not enough to call this a kleptocracy or an idiocracy. There are for certain crooks and idiots among the new House majority, and even within its leadership and committee chairs.

But there is so much more depravity and disqualification than that. Kakistocracy is really the word.

Start with Pelosi, who’s a proven commodity. She got four years as House Speaker from 2007-2011, after which the American people reacted to her governance as they would a rabid coyote in the front yard. She’s hardly improved since — if anything, the episodic moonbattery, unnatural facial tics, brazen public untruths, and irrational pronouncements have become even more frequent and frightening than they were a dozen years ago. That’s not a surprise given Pelosi’s age and clearly declining faculties.

But it gets far worse. The Democrats didn’t bring in any new blood from their previous team of leadership — the one which frittered away their previous majority. You’ve still got Steny Hoyer as the majority leader and James Clyburn as the whip, neither of whom are particularly good spokesmen for what they’d like to present as a youthful, hip, and energetic political movement.

For that presentation, by the way, on offer is the freshman class — the most prominent names in which are Ilhan Omar, a Somali Muslim from Minneapolis who it appears might be married to her own brother and whose only contribution to the national debate so far seems to be a radical hatred of Israel, and the comically ignorant Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose façade of street-kid tough upbringing is as poorly constructed as her understanding of civics and economics. It’s not much of a look, particularly if they want to hold the center.

Then there’s Brad Sherman, the California leftist who couldn’t even make it to noon on Jan. 3 before filing articles of impeachment against President Trump. Sherman was able to act so quickly because he’d filed the same thing back in 2017. Sherman, once voted the second meanest member of Congress behind the hilarious troglodyte Sheila Jackson Lee of the slums of Houston, didn’t wait for guidance from the leadership before rushing off to the impeachment wars. In fact, his impeachment move flies in the face of Pelosi’s statement that “We shouldn’t be impeaching for a political reason, and we shouldn’t avoid impeachment for a political reason.”

Making Pelosi look like an idiot is too easy for blame, but Sherman’s impeachment move also made a monkey out of the new House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler — who stepped away from his usual hyperpartisan conspiracy theorizing to offer a moment of lucidity to Roll Call back in November, when he said…

“If you’re serious about removing a president from office, what you’re really doing is overturning the result of the last election,” Nadler said. “You don’t want to have a situation where you tear this country apart and for the next 30 years half the country’s saying ‘We won the election, you stole it.’”

“I’m talking about the voters, people who voted for Trump,” he said. “Do you think that the case is so stark, that the offenses are so terrible and the proof so clear, that once you’ve laid it all out y