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Republicans had cast aside two previous winners of their closed-door nominating process — Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana and Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio — before settling on Mr. Emmer. Pressed by reporters on Tuesday night about his efforts to overturn the election, Mr. Johnson smiled and shook his head, saying, “next question,” as Republicans beside him booed. House Republicans chose and then quickly repudiated yet another of their nominees for speaker on Tuesday and rushed to name a fourth, pressing to put an end to a remarkable three-week-long deadlock that has left Congress leaderless and paralyzed.
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Johnson has gained stature and won bipartisan praise for letting the whole House vote on the aid package. He also got strong support in the Senate, where even an outright majority of Republicans voted for the aid on Tuesday. As Rep. Jim Jordan meets with a number of allies in hopes of swaying key holdouts to his speakership bid, GOP sources say his opposition could grow if the votes continue over multiple rounds of ballots. 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.
At a Capitol Hill bar, the prolonged fight for a speaker becomes a drinking game.
Biden and McCarthy will have to find compromise come January, when the GOP takes control of the House of Representatives and the Bakersfield Republican is expected to secure the Speaker’s gavel. California Rep. Kevin McCarthy has no business in Congress’ highest office or the presidential line of succession. Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi celebrates a $400 million investment from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law for the Golden Gate Bridge to bolster its resiliency to earthquakes with Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Special Advisor to the President Mitch Landrieu and local leaders. The Bridge Investment Program from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law delivers $12.5 billion to build, repair and replace key bridges across the country. Speaker Emerita Pelosi celebrated with staff in the Speaker’s Lobby after the passage of the Affordable Care Act in the House of Representatives.
Republicans Elect Mike Johnson as House Speaker, Ending Party Chaos
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. He pointed to the fact on the first ballot he had a similar number of defections as former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy who was still able to win the gavel in January after 15 ballots. 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. And now, McCarthy has been counseling Jordan on his speaker’s race strategy, according to multiple sources familiar with the situation, a far more active role than he appeared to be playing when Scalise was the speaker nominee. Jeffries also said that conversations between senior Democrats and Republicans have “accelerated” in recent days and that it’s his hope they will continue to do so tonight. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries indicated that his caucus would be open to reaching some form of agreement with “traditional Republicans” to reopen the House, saying that informal conversations have “accelerated” the last few days and that it’s his hope they will continue.
Despite Republican objections, House Speaker Johnson pushes ahead on aid for Ukraine, Israel and other allies - PBS NewsHour
Despite Republican objections, House Speaker Johnson pushes ahead on aid for Ukraine, Israel and other allies.
Posted: Tue, 16 Apr 2024 07:00:00 GMT [source]
The vote put him second in line to the presidency, capping an extraordinary period of twists and turns on Capitol Hill. It marked a victory for the far right that has become a dominant force in the Republican Party, which rose up this month to effectively dictate the removal of an establishment speaker and the installation of an arch-conservative replacement. 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. 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. 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. Representative Chip Roy of Texas started out as an enthusiastic supporter of Mr. Trump’s claims of a stolen election but gradually grew alarmed about the push to invalidate the results and ultimately opposed Mr. Trump’s bid to get Congress to overturn them on Jan. 6, 2021.
Column: McCarthy’s fall was sudden, but a long time coming
As set out under the Constitution, the session will begin at noon Jan. 3, with all the lawmakers seated on the House floor and members from both parties joining in the vote for speaker. Republican U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy is set to face a case of deja vu come Tuesday. The political future of the 57-year-old will once again be at stake as GOP lawmakers decide whether he should be elected as House speaker.
Jordan is at risk of seeing his opposition grow over multiple ballots, sources say
But even more than his election denialism, Mr. Johnson’s political career has been defined by his religious views. “The slates of electors were produced by a clearly unconstitutional process, period,” he said. 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. “This affirms the path that we took,” Representative Bob Good of Virginia, one of the eight Republicans who voted to oust former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, tells reporters. “We went through a lot to get here, but we are ready to govern and that will begin right away,” Johnson says in his first news conference as speaker.
GOP lawmakers who withheld their support for Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio during his three rounds of voting on the House floor are beginning to line up behind Johnson. 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. In his blueprint for the next few months, Johnson said a stopgap measure extending funding until January or April may be needed to approve more spending and avoid a shutdown. The House has been in a state of uncertainty and chaos since Oct. 3, when rebels forced a vote to oust Mr. McCarthy as speaker. Eight Republicans backed that move along with Democrats, who remained united behind their own leader, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York.
Cal Poly Humboldt campus to remain closed through weekend as protesters occupy buildings
The speaker of the House is the presiding officer of the United States House of Representatives. The House elects its speaker at the beginning of a new Congress (i.e. biennially, after a general election) or when a speaker dies, resigns, or removed from the position intra-term. Since 1839, the House elected speakers by roll call.[1] Traditionally, each party's caucus or conference selects a candidate for the speakership from among its senior leaders prior to the roll call. 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.
Others railed against Mr. Emmer’s vote in favor of a stopgap spending bill put forward by Mr. McCarthy, the speaker at the time, to avert a government shutdown. Still others said he was insufficiently loyal to Mr. Trump, because he voted to certify the results of the 2020 election won by President Biden. Historically, there have been several controversial elections to the speakership, such as the contest of 1839. In that case, even though the 26th United States Congress convened on December 2, the House could not begin the speakership election until December 14 because of an election dispute in New Jersey known as the "Broad Seal War". Two rival delegations, one Whig and the other Democrat, had been certified as elected by different branches of the New Jersey government.
Mr. Johnson has opposed continued funding for the war in Ukraine, which has emerged as a bitter fault line in the G.O.P. and in the spending battles that he will have to navigate in the coming days. Evoking his evangelical Christian faith, Mr. Johnson repeatedly referred to scripture in his speech from the House floor. 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. 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.
The problem was compounded by the fact that the result of the dispute would determine whether the Whigs or the Democrats held the majority. Neither party agreed to permit a speakership election with the opposite party's delegation participating. Finally, it was agreed to exclude both delegations from the election and a speaker was finally chosen on December 17. John Boehner was elected speaker when the 112th Congress convened on January 5, 2011, and was subsequently re-elected twice, at the start of the 113th and 114th Congresses. In 1989 Speaker Jim Wright of Texas resigned under pressure following revelations about a book deal the House Ethics Committee saw as circumventing fundraising rules. Longworth's successor, John "Cactus Jack" Garner of Texas, left the office after just over a year to be Franklin Roosevelt's first vice president.
CNN reported that Mr. Trump also called Representative Andy Biggs, who switched from voting against Mr. McCarthy to voting “present” on the 15th round. Even by the heated standards of the tensions that flared among House Republicans during their four-day push to elect a speaker, what happened on the House floor around 11 p.m. The prolonged election prompted tension and uncertainty in the Capitol, where lawmakers in both parties had grown impatient and bored awaiting the outcome of a high-stakes struggle that seemed at once monumental and absurd. “The motion to vacate is accountability,” he added, referring to the measure allowing a snap vote to remove the speaker. Friday night, Mr. McCarthy remained one vote short of what he needed to seal the deal.
The House passed a long-stalled foreign aid package on Saturday that gives funding to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, with a majority of lawmakers backing money for American allies across the globe. But this time around several Democrats have indicated they would cross the aisle to support Johnson and frustrate Greene & Co. if it came to a vote. Democratic leaders have indicated they are open to this, and it essentially repeats the strategy that allowed Johnson to pass the Ukraine portion of the aid bill earlier this month. Passing each bill, in votes expected Saturday, will require Johnson to form complicated bipartisan coalitions on each, with Democrats for example ensuring Ukraine aid is approved, but some left-leaning progressives refusing to back military aid for Israel over the destruction of Gaza. Still, Jeffries said that a majority of Democrats would vote Saturday for the packages of aid for Ukraine, Israel and allies in Asia.
Gingrich managed to restore many of the powers of the speakership but clashed repeatedly with Clinton and even with Republican leaders in the Senate. In 1997, in his second Congress as speaker, he barely survived a largely covert challenge from within his own leadership team. And just shy of his fourth anniversary in the job, he was voted out by the full House Republican conference in December 1998. In the weeks after an election, the Republican conference and the Democratic caucus hold an informal vote among their members to decide whom they want to nominate to lead their party in January.
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