Highlights: After Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) fell short of the votes he needed on the House floor a third time, House Republicans voted to ditch Jordan as their party’s speaker nominee. Jordan lost the closed-door secret ballot vote 112 to 86.
The tremendously difficult challenge is that just one GOP candidate somehow needs to unite nearly all members of both camps, even though they have seemingly irreconcilable demands.
With such long-established, high-profile Republicans falling flat, several much less well-known members of Congress will now try their luck. Reps. Kevin Hern (R-OK), Jack Bergman (R-MI), Austin Scott (R-GA), Byron Donalds (R-FL), and Mike Johnson (R-LA) declared their candidacies Friday afternoon after the GOP voted to drop Jordan.
The GOP’s new speaker candidates have little national profile. But perhaps it will take someone who is less firmly associated with either the existing leadership or the hardline-right faction to unite the GOP — someone who can make nice-sounding promises to both sides.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Right-wing holdouts deposed McCarthy and doomed Scalise’s speakership bid by insisting on a hardliner as speaker.
But those holdouts have now been counterbalanced by a newly emerged bloc of mainstream members who took down Jordan and are insisting the speaker not be a hardliner.
The tremendously difficult challenge is that just one GOP candidate somehow needs to unite nearly all members of both camps, even though they have seemingly irreconcilable demands.
Reps. Kevin Hern (R-OK), Jack Bergman (R-MI), Austin Scott (R-GA), Byron Donalds (R-FL), and Mike Johnson (R-LA) declared their candidacies Friday afternoon after the GOP voted to drop Jordan.
But perhaps it will take someone who is less firmly associated with either the existing leadership or the hardline-right faction to unite the GOP — someone who can make nice-sounding promises to both sides.
The mainstream and swing district members generally want to get the House back open and elect a speaker — they just had specific grievances against Jordan — but they’d likely support Generic Republican for the job.
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