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It was a notably different posture than the one McCarthy took toward Scalise, his former top deputy who has long been seen as his potential rival. McCarthy did not give a speech after Scalise secured his party nomination on Wednesday, sources said. Jordan’s allies were hoping that Scalise supporters would help whip fellow Scalise allies who voted against Jordan. But Scalise’s allies feel like they did far more to rally around Jordan than Jordan did when Scalise initially won the nomination last week. It’s now been two weeks of high-stakes chaos over the speaker’s gavel following the unprecedented ouster of Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
Republicans nominate Mike Johnson for speaker after spurning Emmer.
Exhausted from the feuding, which unleashed a barrage of recriminations and violent threats against lawmakers, both the right wing and mainstream Republicans finally united to elect Mr. Johnson, 51, in a 220-to-209 vote. The vote has not yet been scheduled, but Jordan’s team has vowed to force another floor vote today. Jordan is now meeting with key chairmen and top Republicans in House Majority Whip Tom Emmer’s office as they try to lean on holdouts and make offers to win their support. Jordan said the expected return of Florida Rep. Gus Bilirakis, a Jordan supporter who missed the first vote to be at his mother-in-law’s funeral, should help him and insisted they are chipping away at the holdouts.
McCarthy team makes an offer to conservative opponents who are reviewing it now
Marjorie Taylor Greene renews attacks on speaker as House passes Ukraine aid - The Guardian US
Marjorie Taylor Greene renews attacks on speaker as House passes Ukraine aid.
Posted: Sun, 21 Apr 2024 17:05:00 GMT [source]
Mr. Johnson’s abrupt rise to the speaker post this week in the depressed and divided House Republican conference underscores the rightward lurch of the G.O.P., which dumped his more mainstream predecessor, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California. In December 2020, Mr. Johnson collected signatures for a legal brief in support of a Texas lawsuit, rooted in baseless claims of widespread election irregularities, that tried to throw out the results in four battleground states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr. A social conservative, Mr. Johnson played a leading role in recruiting House Republicans to sign a legal brief supporting a lawsuit seeking to overturn the results.
Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives
Mr. Paulovitz, a retired businessman, dismissed his representative’s run for speaker in a place that representative knows all too well — outside Luigi’s, a popular lunch eatery that has long been a piece of Mr. McCarthy’s self-spun Bakersfield lore. Ms. Alli and Ms. Cole work under the clerk of the House of Representatives, Cheryl L. Johnson, who is charged with keeping lawmakers in order until a new speaker is elected. Two Republicans who were absent for personal reasons from votes earlier in the day, Ken Buck of Colorado and Wesley Hunt of Texas, were expected to be back in time for the vote.
There's been a history of hard landings
“The personalities involved are different,” Rep. Mike Garcia, R-Calif., said in an interview yesterday, referring to Gaetz, who led the effort to oust McCarthy and had been his chief antagonist for months. Scalise, who once described himself as “David Duke without the baggage,” came under fire for his reported 2002 attendance at an event hosted by the white nationalist group European-American Unity and Rights Organization, a group founded by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. "It’s going to be a really good conversation with our full conference," he said as he walked in. Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., said the big meetings of all House Republicans aren't helping them reach a decision.
A government shutdown is fast approaching, and the White House has requested a $106 billion emergency aid package for Israel, Ukraine and other priorities. Johnson now faces a daunting list of challenges, with a fast-approaching government shutdown chief among them. The House is staring down a deadline of Nov. 17, when current government funding expires.
'Quite a journey,' Scalise tells reporters after dropping bid
Now that a House speaker has been selected following a days-long stalemate and members have finally been sworn in, the chamber can look toward picking back up business and organizing GOP-led committees. In a letter to colleagues earlier Wednesday, Johnson outlined his first priority will be trying to pass the remaining spending bills that have so far languished in the House one by one. But Johnson indicated that given the time constraints, if those bills can’t pass quickly, he’d look to fund to government using what is known as a short-term spending bill or continuing resolution that would run either through January 15 or April 15, whichever the conference supports.
She has written for outlets including the Washington Examiner, Daily Signal and Alexandria Times. Melissa covers U.S. politics, with a focus on the Supreme Court and federal courts. Johnson won 128 votes, and Donalds received 29 votes, and there was a vote of "present." McCarthy, who was not a nominee, received 43 votes. Although Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was not in the running, he received more votes than Donalds in the final round.
House Dems are told to stay in Washington for possible vote tomorrow
They had demanded the ability to hold a vote on the House floor for each individual earmark. In an effort to win them over, Mr. McCarthy has offered to give rank-and-file lawmakers more influence in the process of writing spending bills. One official briefed on that emerging compromise said if a lawmaker took issue with a certain earmark, they could force such a vote. Proponents of earmarks argue that they allow rank-and-file lawmakers to deliver for their constituents and smooth the process of keeping the government running, by giving members of Congress a tangible reason to vote in favor of spending bills. But Mr. McCarthy’s detractors, hard-line Republicans who have railed against federal spending, have demanded a commitment to crack down on the practice as a prerequisite for supporting him. The protracted fight foreshadowed how difficult it would be for him to govern with an exceedingly narrow majority and an unruly hard-right faction bent on slashing spending and disrupting business in Washington.
In the years before he arrived in Congress in 2017, Mr. Johnson worked as an attorney and spokesman for the anti-abortion-rights and anti-gay group Alliance Defense Fund — now called the Alliance Defending Freedom. During that time, he expressed some of his hard-line views in editorials in the local newspaper in his hometown of Shreveport, La. In Congress, Mr. Johnson has voted for a national abortion ban and co-sponsored a 20-week abortion ban, earning him an A-plus rating from the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. After the Supreme Court voted to overturn Roe v. Wade in June last year, he celebrated.
In 1997, several Republican congressional leaders tried to force Speaker Newt Gingrich to resign. However, Gingrich refused since that would have required a new election for speaker, which could have led to Democrats along with dissenting Republicans voting for Democrat Dick Gephardt (then minority leader) as speaker. After the 1998 midterm elections where the Republicans lost seats, Gingrich did not stand for re-election.
They enlarged the party leadership structure, creating wider networks of loyalty among members of the majority party while strengthening support for their priorities. By 1910, Speaker Joe Cannon had centralized power to such an extent that many of his own party members rebelled. Mr. McCarthy watched as the hard-right flank of that majority ran John A. Boehner of Ohio from his speakership in 2015 and blocked his own first attempt at securing the job, after 40 of its members announced that they would not support him, questioning his conservative credentials. Mr. Gosar, who voted against Mr. McCarthy on multiple ballots but changed his vote to support him on Friday, spread numerous lies about the 2020 election and spoke at “Stop the Steal” rallies arranged by Ali Alexander, a prominent organizer. Such steps, however, would inevitably prolong the process of approving spending bills.
Mr. Roy, an initial holdout against Mr. McCarthy, led negotiations to try to bring about a deal that would make Mr. McCarthy the speaker in exchange for changes to House rules. Not every Republican involved in blocking Mr. McCarthy’s ascension was among those who voted against certifying Mr. Biden’s victory. “We stand here with our democracy intact because of those officers,” said Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the top Democrat in the House, as tears welled up in some House members’ eyes. While some had received subpoenas in the Jan. 6 investigations and were later referred to the House Ethics Committee, their power showed they were far from outcasts and had paid little price for their actions. And the Senate, traditionally viewing itself as the more refined chamber, chose not to hang around for the slugfest in the House. Instead, senators organized without incident and expeditiously vacated the Capitol to let their counterparts across the Rotunda sully themselves alone.
But the speech infuriated Mr. Trump, and Mr. McCarthy quickly worked to get back in the former president’s good graces, traveling to his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, three weeks later to meet with him. They also were unhappy that he had suggested in an interview on Fox News that the House committee investigating the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, had the political aim of damaging Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. But after former President Donald J. Trump placed phone calls to a group of key holdouts, and a frenzied round of haggling on the House floor, Mr. McCarthy was broadly grinning again. The practice of earmarking — where a single lawmaker can use a sliver of the sprawling government budget to send money to a specific project in his or her state — has been both embraced and reviled over the years.
Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., abruptly left the meeting with his Republican colleagues, blasting the "eight traitors" who "put this country in this situation" by voting to oust McCarthy. Scalise said that he wanted to speak to all the Republican members, rather than just individually or in smaller groups, to try to "bring our conference together." Nehls said he didn't see any one candidate whom Republican members can agree on. The House is expected to adjourn tonight without a vote on speaker, according to a notice sent to all Democrats by Whip Clark. On his way into the meeting, Scalise said they will continue discussions with members. He added that there are "some folks that really need to look in the mirror in the next couple of days and decide are we going to get back on track? Are they going to try to pursue their own agenda? You can’t do both. And I think we’re going to get there."
So much of what House Republicans want to do legislatively will go nowhere in the Democratic Senate, but the Republican majority will be able to conduct the investigations it has promised and McCarthy is emphasizing that point. This is the first time Hal Rogers of Kentucky swears in the speaker, following the death of Don Young of Alaska in 2022. After days of a bare stone wall, the Speaker McCarthy sign has been hung outside the office. Left unmentioned was that many of the same rebels who helped lead the effort in Congress to overturn the 2020 election, giving rise to the assault that day, were also among the final holdouts working to block Mr. McCarthy’s ascent.
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