Majority Leader Scalise Withdrawing From Speaker of the House Race
“Our conference still has to come together and we’re not there. There are still some people that have their own agendas”
Majority Leader Steve Scalise has withdrawn from the Speaker of the House race.
SCALISE – “Our conference still has to come together and we’re not there. There are still some people that have their own agendas”
— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) October 12, 2023
Scalise withdraws name as candidate in House Speaker race … pic.twitter.com/lJ33ar3pBy
— Howard Mortman (@HowardMortman) October 13, 2023
Scalise needed 217 Republican votes to win. He only received 113 votes to become the nominee. Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan got 99 votes.
Therefore, the Republicans did not bring the vote for Speaker to the House floor.
Jordan ended up backing Scalise, even offering to announce the nomination on the floor.
Jordan’s efforts did not convince some of those backing him to vote for Scalise.
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Comments
Newt had some good points today on what to pay attention to in regards to the position.
There were 435 elections that put them there, and it will take a powerful person to get them to actually represent the 435 races.
No surprise. He didn’t have a way to 217. Now the interesting part becomes whether Jordan can do it, given the fact that there are still some McCarthy supporters who aren’t in any mood to compromise with the Gaetz gang.
He did have a way to 217, he just didn’t want to actually have to negotiate for votes. It hasn’t even been 24 hours since the Scalise-Jordan vote. You can’t possibly claim that they engaged in good-faith negotiation in that time period.
And yes, that is going to be interesting, Jordan is going to have to do some hard negotiating for votes if he wants to be Speaker.
I think Jordan is likely going to be able to do it, but the question is how much he’s going to have to give away in order to get the votes.
I think most likely Gaetz let him know that he and his weren’t interested in good faith negotiation.
Gaetz is going to end up handing the gavel to Hakeem Jeffries
There’s no way for that to happen, since no Republican would ever vote for him.
Don’t make stuff up. Gaetz announced his support for Scalise yesterday.
You’re wrong because Gaetz said he would vote for him if he got the nomination.
No, he didn’t. He never had a chance before the usual suspects declared that they wouldn’t vote for anybody but Jordan.
True, but that was only about the first ballot. He shouldn’t have expected to win on the first ballot. The negotiations should have been about the second ballot, or at least about on which ballot they would finally switch to him.
Jordan was whipping for him and didn’t get them to change their minds. Why would you think that Scalise would be able to?
MIddle of a MIddle east war…..great time to play political games.
Take the clown act somewhere else, nobody is buying it.
They’re getting all the support they need already, absolutely NOTHING different would be happening in the ME if there were a Speaker. There are no votes or bills waiting in the wings for a Speaker.
These are not “political games”. The Speaker determines a great deal about how the House is going to actually operate. This is very real. It’s morons like you who don’t understand the serious nature of what is at stake.
It’s a shit job and Gaetz and company are holding the House hostage. The one house of the legislative branch of fed gov and it is impotent right now thanks to this.
It’s morons like you that can’t grow up and learn to have a functional government that makes a few compromises. You want McCarthy out, fine. Don’t make this clown show that only tells the most important voters in the country (the independents) that you can’t effectively govern with a dysfunctional civil war in your own party.
Gaetz days ago said he would vote for Scalise. You are the fourth or fifth person to make stuff up about Gaetz.
There is plenty to criticize without making stuff up.
Who is your Congressman? Gaetz is mine.
Has yours taken money from McCarthy’s PAC?
What has yours said?
Jus takin the 💰 an shuttin up.
Gaetz is the reason it’s vacant. Try again.
I don’t care much about McCarthy or his PAC but making your own party rife for attack on the national stage is just the dumbest thing you can do right now.
You’ll see what I mean come November.
It isn’t like those people do anything important anyways, their job is to steal from us, period.
You left out regulating us to death.
What an absolute clown.
It’s been less than 24 hours since they took their precious secret vote to make him the candidate.
For him to pull this means that he only wanted to be Speaker when he thought he was going to be automatically crowned after winning a bare majority of votes in a secret ballot.
He hasn’t had time to do any good-faith negotiation with Jordan’s supporters.
To pull out this fast means that he only wanted to be Speaker when he didn’t have to actually lower himself to negotiate with Jordan’s supporters for their votes.
And that says an awful lot about him.
Now, obviously, since Jordan is the presumptive candidate, he’s going to have to do the exact same thing, and negotiate with Scalise’s supporters for their votes.
The problem wasn’t Jordan’s supporters. The problem is Gaetz and his merry band of trolls.
Like it or lump it the 2 dozen or so more populist members ain’t gonna allow themselves to get railroaded or pressured into supporting someone for Speaker who fails to acknowledge their current position as the key swing bloc. There’s no need to rush. The day to day business of the HoR can still occur, all the committees can still function. The legacy corporate media is always gonna call the GoP names it’s part of the cultural tapestry. Ignore them and do the hard work of explaining the current reality to those members who haven’t internalized it yet and seem stuck in mid 2000’s go along get along in DC instead of adherence to the policies the member’s CD sent them to DC to support.
When it was decades of moderate to liberal members of the GoP demanding legislation be watered down to get their votes I don’t recall nearly so much gnashing of teeth by the DC establishment folks and their surrogates. Now that the shoe is on the other foot these folks are mighty upset that the fit is uncomfortable.
About 45 members won’t support anyone Gaetz supports
Then we won’t have a speaker and the House of Representative won’t be able to vote on anything else. I fail to see a problem with this
Then maybe THEY are the problem that need to be voted out.
It’s a bigger number than that the d/prog have over 200 members…oh wait …. you meant 45 GoP moderate/liberals who are intransigent b/c they have temporarily lost their grip on the levers of power.
This is as effective as switching parties or going independent. This bloc has done nothing but cause the limited amount of governmental check on progressives to be nullified and impotent.
Why don’t you tell us, again, how a Democrat will become speaker 😂😂
Please explain in detail exactly how taking our time to select a Speaker has ’caused the limited amount of governmental check on progressives to be nullified and impotent’.
The committees are still able to do their day to day work. The govt is operating under a CR that expires in a few weeks and in Jan an automatic mini sequestration budget (1% reduction from FY23) goes into effect if no new budget passes by 1 Jan.
The leverage at present is in the hands of those who want reduced govt spending. All they have to do is wait till 1 Jan. Same for the selection of a Speaker the thin margins put the power into the hands of the populist bloc removing it from the moderate/liberal bloc.
You keep repeating this as if it meant something. I wonder if you’ll be saying the same thing if/when a group of 20 McCarthy supporters does the same thing.
The moderate/liberal bloc has been doing this same sort of thing for decades.
But of course they haven’t. No Speaker has ever been removed from office before this. Besides, that’s an evasion, not a response.
Not an evasion at all. In the past several decades when meaningful questions of policy, strategy and direction arose before GoP in the HoR the basic outline was;
1. Campaign to do X
2. Raise $ to do X
3. Receive the votes to achieve a HoR majority due to promises of X
Then comes the swearing in of those Members who were elected to do X. Suddenly despite a majority we can’t get X. Why b/c the liberal/moderate members never had any intention of delivering on X. They seek all sorts of excuses even creating them when the don’t exist b/c they don’t want X.
That small(ish) cohort of liberal/moderate members gums up the works and the original legislation is either watered down to irrelevance or get their votes or it fails to pass b/c they oppose it.
The same thing is occurring now. It’s just that, for the moment, the populists hold the whip hand. The only difference is who holds the key swing votes. The populist bloc does for now and many folks are losing their damn minds. Everyone complaining needs to show their same outrage and amount of ink spilled in the past when the roles were reversed. If they can’t or won’t do that ….well that lack may reveal something about the depth of their sincerity re being willing to take one for the team as they demand the populists do once more in this scenario.
No, the problem is that McCarthy reneged on the deal he made to get job. He was banking on his commie palz across the aisle bailing his ass out if Gaetz pulled the nuke option.
GOPe gonna GOPe. You people never learn.
Your assumptive assertion basically says that Gaetz played right into their hands along with McCarthy.
Great job, dumbass.
Why do people like you come onto this site and turn it into a bottom-feeding sewer like TGP? Aren’t you old enough to not attack others because they disagree with you? Are you so insecure that insults are your only weapon? Sounds like your idol.
Well all McCarthy had to do was keep his end of the deal. He didn’t, he f***** around, he found out
No, my assertion is that McCarthy reneged on the deal and brought it on himself. Reading is hard, huh?
“Your assumptive assertion basically says that Gaetz played right into their hands along with McCarthy.”
You really need to understand that, after making his deal to become speaker, McCarthy was counting on DEMOCRATS backing him to allow him to remain speaker in the face of his breaking that deal.
Gaetz, and his cohorts understood something that McCarthy, McConnell, and McDaniel and the rest of the RINOs and GOPe never seem to get –that the Democrats WILL NEVER support them.
When Gaetz called him on his treachery, McCarthy looked left for help and discovered that the scorpion he’d been carrying WAS perfectly willing to let them both die– because that was it’s nature.
And the RINOs, the GOPe, and the Dems are revealed as having the power to only destroy. Scalise, sadly, included.
The only way forward, is with the folks who understood, even before the original deal was made with McCarthy, that all of this would unfold exactly as it has.
Rudy, calling gaetz a dumbass is not attacking anyone on this site.
As a public figure, I can criticize him for what I see as a dumb move. I wasn’t calling Paddy a dumbass.
+100
And no he was not counting on Dems. He was counting on his own party not to try and commit political suicide.
Gaetz announced his support for Scalise.
Making stuff up doesn’t help.
Or his wife finally convinced him that this and cancer were one cross too many.
That is how it’s supposed to work.
No, it isn’t. Each member of that body is sent to represent a different section of the country that’s distinctly different from all of the others. They are not there to represent the party that they’re represent their constituents
Which they can do no matter who is Speaker.
You don’t think they should represent their constituents during the selection of the speaker? If their constituents have the priority of lowered government spending, that would be a very important consideration during selection of a speaker since that’s who gets to put legislation on the floor.
That’s certainly how it worked in the past but that doesn’t mean it has to be that way forever. This idea the GoP conference must/should be working under some pseudo parliamentary majority in back rooms and non recorded votes without transparency to the voters of their CD is BS.
The party is important but it is not paramount. The usual way of doing things has produced fewer significant legislative victories and those few were watered down. This despite the voters back home demanding more aggressive and expansive action.
Given that this is the Republican Party we are talking about, whose highest priority other than graft is never fighting Democrats; do not be surprised if McCarthy does not end up as Speaker again.
Subotai Bahadur
“do not be surprised if McCarthy does not end up as Speaker again.”
I hesitate to say that I do not disagree with you.
I agree. I don’t think McCarthy is going to be speaker again.
He’s counting on it
Replying to what I think you meant to write, I wouldn’t mind McCarthy as speaker again. I think he’s probably the best choice. But it would be a McCarthy who had learned his lesson.
Oh dear God
He isn’t speaker because Gaetz hates his guts and has cronies. This was always going to happen.
I haven’t seen a a single good choice in a politician. Even the least delusional ones are still playing to the crowd, what you can say and what you can’t say even though it’s an important nuance.
I think Thomas Sowell said it best when he said when you demand the impossible, only Liars will suffice
McCarty was working behind the scenes to stab his bro in the back I heard
thanks for the useless treeper update
Well it does seem that McCarthy went to Brandon the pedophile and tried to make a secret deal for a continuing resolution instead of just following regular order like he promised.
You are a very unhappy person
pot meet kettle…..but please keep telling everyone about your shitblog fantasy reports
In a de facto two-party system, there will always be turmoil within each party, and that’s certainly been true in this country going back to John Adams and the Federalists.
That said, it’s also been true that the two parties have almost always contained their internal factionalism, and that we’ve never seen BOTH parties captured by their radicals simultaneously. The closest we’ve come in modern industrial era is 1964 followed by 1972, first the Republicans and then the Dermocrats.
Today, the Democrats are a mess: a senile, corrupt president held up by a corrupt media. The Republicans are a mess: their leading presidential candidate isn’t senile but he’s non compos mentis, and now their thin majority in the House is in the midst of a political civil war.
I’m a right-leaning independent, and have been for a decade after leaving the Dems in embarrassment that turned into disgust, and have been increasingly attracted by at least some of the Republicans’ ideas. But ideas aren’t enough. You also need character, maturity, and intelligence, and those are no less missing among the Republicans as they are among the Democrats.
So, fine cannibals, keep it up. The Democrats don’t care about this country? I’ve thought that for a decade. The Republicans don’t care about this country? That’s what I’m beginning to think now. The Republican Party that I was edging toward is a god damn joke. It’s a pack of babies, led (?) by Donald Trump, the biggest political baby in America.
Now, conservatives, downvote the hell out of me for this, but go check: about one-quarter of Americans are Democats, and one-quarter are Republicans. I am part of the half of this country who pukes at the thought of either party. Loyal to this? Are you crazy? Better not answer that. UGH.
Not every conservative will downvote you….just cultists.
I am glad more people are realizing there isn’t a wide gulf between the two parties. They pretend that there is so as to give the peasants an outlet for their frustrations other than violence. They are pretty much all in the club. We aren’t.
While there is a good deal of truth in the uniparty theory the actions of d/prog this week certainly highlights the difference. The d/prog have prominent figures, including in Congress, telling us Hamas is the real victim and most other elected d/prog refusing to call them out on it. Seems like a very clear, very obvious line of demarcation to me.
My loyalty is to my country. My mantra: “Country first.” No political party has all the answers. God help us if they did. It’s about time that the party loyalists, whatever their faction, thought hard about that. COUNTRY FIRST.
God, family, country. In that order
I heard today that McCarthy’s agenda was basically written by Scalise. So, if he became Speaker there would be no changes to their work or negotiations.
So what you’re saying is that heat of anticipated emotion to vacate in his future had he tried the same crap. Because there’s no doubt now that somebody will pull the ripcord
Holy crap, autocorrect. He sort of anticipated a motion to vacate in his future should he pull the same crap
That rule needs to go away. One person shouldn’t be allowed to throw a monkey wrench into the proceedings every time they get butt hurt or feel disrepected.
What a joke.
Gaetz wasn’t ‘butt hurt’ or ‘disrespected’.
McCarthy made a deal to be Speaker, and he violated it repeatedly. Gaetz spent literally weeks trying to get McCarthy to live up to his promises, and finally had enough after McCarthy decided that he was going to cut secret backroom deals with his buddies the Democrats. McCarthy thought that they were going to protect him, and publicly taunted Gaetz to ‘bring it on’.
The ‘monkey wrench into the proceedings’ was McCarthy deciding that he would rather negotiate with Democrats, and finding out the hard way that they have even less honor than he does.
My understanding is that rule was the norm in the House until Pelosi did away with it to make sure no one could challenge her reign of terror. Don’t blame someone for expecting another to keep his promise and I seem to remember McCarthy saying some pretty nasty things about Goetz during the Speaker vote. I also remember McCarthy putting his hands on Goetz during one of the votes on the floor. That would not make Goetz inclined to help out in any way
Nope. A single ‘butthurt’ member can bring the motion however it takes a majority to pass it. One person can’t do it by themselves. The rule was restored to hold the Speaker directly accountable for following through on his promises to the populist bloc in return for their votes to make him Speaker.
No, it should stay because representative should be able to hold the speaker responsible. Under the old rules it took a majority for the motion to pass, so it was never going to pass
I thought either Scalise or Jordan would be a good fit. MTGreen said she would not vote for Scalise because she was concerned about his ongoing fight with cancer and how that would affect his role as Speaker . That seems reasonable to me although I would be inclined to vote for him anyways and let him try. Some clown from Florida said he would only vote for McCarthy again and he is not alone.
Goetz&Co all backed either Jordan or Scalise so the problem is not them, it’s the large block insisting McCarthy be put back in power.
So let them vote until the cows come home. They can do a lot less damage with no House Speaker.
Damn straight
Oh how the “ANOTHER TRUMP NOMINEE LOST” crowd crowed a little too early hahahahhahahaaaaaa!!
But just goes to show how depraved these people are. They’d rather just have another go along to get along Democrat lite as the speaker instead of someone who would actually stand up for Americans.
Fuck them all! Let Rome burn to the ground. The sooner it happens the sooner we can all start from scratch.
It is said that at the end of the fall of the Roman empire, most of the citizenry was simply glad to be out from under the tyrants.
Trump endorsed McCarthy for speaker. Try again.
With no Speaker, the next in line of presidential succession is the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, Patty Murray (D-WA).