Tuesday will be a make-or-break day for the Republican Party in the House.
After having burned up the phone lines all weekend, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) is ready to have the House vote on a new Speaker.
As I am penning this report, the House is voting on the next Speaker of the House.
As of Friday, Jim Jordan did not have enough support in the Republican caucus to win the vote but has swung some votes back in his favor.
Jordan spoke with those who were not supporting him on Friday to try to turn them. He made significant progress, but it was pretty clear before the vote took place that he would not get to 217.
When it came time for McCarthy to vote, he got a round of applause for calling out Jordan’s name.
Scalise received the same reception for casing a vote for Jordan.
Jordan appeared to think that he had enough support to take this vote.
When Jordan was asked about his chances, he was very upbeat.
Jordan stated:
“I feel really good. Whatever it takes to get a speaker today.
“We need to get a speaker today and we feel really good about where we’re at.”
By the time I finish the report, the vote will have concluded, so I will have the final tally at the bottom, but I still wanted to comment on how I saw this playing out.
By Tuesday morning, it was believed there were less than 10 members who were not on board with Jim Jordan as the next Speaker.
The fact that we already had one person voting for McCarthy shows that leadership has failed in whipping the entire caucus to get behind Jordan in this vote.
This fell on our Whip, Majority Leader, and McCarthy to get these people in line and stop playing games.
As the first round of voting concluded, the clerk called out several names that had missed the initial call for a vote, with there still being several Republicans missing and two more dissenting voices against Jordan.
That being the case, Jordan failed to win the gavel on the first vote, with only 200 votes, well short of the number he would need.
McCarthy, Zeldin, and Scalise all received multiple votes, with four other members receiving a single vote. Of the 222 possible votes, there were also two absences, so somehow Jordan needed to turn all but two of those dissenters to vote in his favor by the following vote.
McCarthy could be seen after the voting talking to the few people who had still voted for him, and I would suspect that Scalise and Emmer were doing the same thing to get these votes in line, as these people had clearly made their point.
As I stated before, if Jordan does not get this vote, I don’t know who they can nominate to get the unanimous vote as the Speaker.
