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The choice House Republicans make to replace John Boehner as speaker will say a lot about how the party is going to handle its current identity crisis. Will it finally take governing seriously, or will it go on using its majority in Congress to shut down the government, hold show votes on health care reform, stymie President Obama and try to stop Hillary Clinton from becoming president?

The current conventional wisdom holds that the leading candidate is the majority leader, Kevin McCarthy of California. Mr. McCarthy, at least, said on Monday that it is time to stop “governing by crisis,” and that he would look for “the most conservative solution I can find.” That might, possibly, hint that he is open to compromise.

His promotion, however, would leave the majority leader spot open. And, as Jennifer Steinhauer reports today, some in the party are hoping to elevate Trey Gowdy to that position.

Mr. Gowdy, of South Carolina, was elected in 2010 and built a reputation sponsoring marginal and often bizarre bits of legislation, like the 2014 bill that would allow the House of Representatives to sue the president of the United States if it did not like the way the president was enforcing the law.

He’s a big supporter of repealing the Affordable Care Act and, of course, of denying federal money to Planned Parenthood.

But Mr. Gowdy has made his biggest splash by running the congressional investigation that is ostensibly into the killings at the Benghazi diplomatic compound on September 11, 2012, but that most often just seems like an attempt to mess around with Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. Mr. Gowdy was part of Representative Darrell Issa’s team when he took over the House Government Oversight Committee after the 2010 elections and vowed to conduct “seven hearings a week, times 40 weeks” just to thwart President Obama.

Mr. Gowdy raises lots of money for other members of the committee. And if you’re lucky enough to be on their mailing list, you will know that he is the darling of the StopHillaryPAC, which says it is single-mindedly dedicated to doing just that. Mr. Gowdy, for the record, has said he doesn’t want to raise money off the Benghazi investigation or to have his name used for that purpose.

Choosing Mr. Gowdy as majority leader would cement the current Republican Party as the party of the marginal right, of obstruction as a substitute for lawmaking, and of the abuse of congressional investigative and subpoena powers for partisan purposes.