While the House Republican conference was in turmoil Friday as GOP lawmakers struggled to cobble together enough votes to elect a speaker, California Congresswoman Katie Porter sat quietly on the other side of the aisle reading a book.

Poerter, dressed to match the books cover, was reading, "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F**k," making a not-so-subtle statement that captured how many Democrats were feeling after watching Republicans try and fail to elect a House speaker again and again over four days. 

The New York Times best-selling self-help book by Mark Manson argues that people need to stop thinking positively and learn to cope with bad situations in order to be happy, albeit in much more profane terms. 

Republicans were in a bad situation until an agreement was reached between McCarthy and the 20 GOP dissidents who demanded several concessions before lending him their support. The beleaguered California Republican was finally elected House speaker on the 15th ballot since Tuesday, winning over most of the holdouts while six anti-McCarthy Republicans voted "present" to let him win. 

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The price he paid is an agreement that will dramatically reshape the way the House of Representatives is run. 

McCarthy agreed to allow a single lawmaker to make a motion to elect a new speaker, returning to the way the House ran for decades before that practice was eliminated under former Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He agreed to votes on term limits and the adoption of a budget resolution that balances the budget in 10 years, and a cap on fiscal year 2024 spending at FY 2022 levels.

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McCarthy agreed to reject any negotiations on spending with the Senate until the Senate passes its own spending bills. He agreed not to increase the debt limit without spending cuts or other fiscal reforms, to set up a committee to examine the weaponization of government against U.S. citizens, and to ensure no bills are brought up on the floor until at least 72 hours passed.

And he agreed to give three members of the House Freedom Caucus three seats on the House Rules Committee, which sets the terms of debate for all legislation headed to the House floor.

"The 15th time's the charm, apparently. Americans deserve more than House Republicans' inability to govern—and better than their proposed rule changes," Porter tweeted after McCarthy won the election. "Their agreement to weaken watchdogs, empower extremists, and tip the scales toward special interests betrays the American people."

Fox News' Peter Kasperowicz contributed to this report.

For the first time, new images from the James Webb Space Telescope have revealed galaxies with stellar bars at a time when the universe was a quarter of its present age. 

Stellar bars are elongated features of stars that stretch from the centers of galaxies into their outer disks. They funnel gas into central regions, boosting star formation.

In a release, the University of Texas said the find of the barred galaxies will require scientists to fine-tune their theories of galaxy evolution, and noted that the Hubble Space Telescope had never detected bars at such young epochs. 

For example, while the galaxy EGS-23205 appears blurry in a Hubble image, the image from Webb is more defined, revealing a spiral galaxy with a clear stellar bar.

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The James Webb Space Telescope has a larger mirror, giving it more light-gathering ability and allowing it to see farther with higher resolution. 

As it observes longer infrared wavelengths than Hubble, it can also see through dust better.

"I took one look at these data, and I said, ‘We are dropping everything else!’" Shardha Jogee, professor of astronomy at The University of Texas at Austin, said in a statement, describing data from the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey (CEERS).

Another barred galaxy, EGS-24268, is also from about 11 billion years ago – making two barred galaxies existing farther back in time than previously discovered.

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The international group of researchers highlighted these galaxies and showed examples of four others from more than 8 billion years ago in an article in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. 

Two undergraduate students played a key role by visually reviewing hundreds of galaxies and searching for those that could be analyzed with a more stringent mathematical approach.

Bars also aid in the formation of supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies, channeling the gas part of the way. 

The existence of these bars, the university said, challenges theoretical models, and the team will be testing different models in additional work.

"This discovery of early bars means galaxy evolution models now have a new pathway via bars to accelerate the production of new stars at early epochs," Jogee said.