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The latest funding bill to avoid a federal government shutdown lacks additional funding for Ukraine. "Sadly, because I am in California to mourn the loss of and pay tribute to my dear friend Dianne Feinstein, I am unable to retrieve my belongings at this time,” Pelosi said in a statement, referring to the California senator who died last week. The congressman temporarily leading the House of Representatives as interim speaker is a top ally of Kevin McCarthy, who was ousted Tuesday from the speaker’s chair. His predecessor, Frederick Gillett of Massachusetts, also had the top job for less than five years. But when he left after the 1924 session, his party was still firmly in control and had just elected President Calvin Coolidge to a full term.
Bipartisan House coalition advances Ukraine aid
One was Joseph Martin of Massachusetts, who led the party in the House during two brief interludes of majority status after World War II. Both lasted only the minimum two years, the first ending with Democratic Harry S. Truman's surprise White House win in 1948. Martin was back four years later when Eisenhower was first elected president in 1952, but that tour at the top was cut short by his party's sharp losses two years later. 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.
Stefanik nominates Johnson for speaker
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. "We'll be talking about the support and what's necessary to get it. We have to ensure that Vladimir Putin is not successful and I think all the House Republicans are united in that cause," he told reporters, despite opposition from many Republicans to more aid for Ukraine. "We'll be talking about how that's going to be done here in the coming days and it's a top priority."
The divisions playing out in the Capitol this week have posed problems for Kevin McCarthy at home, too.
Like Johnson an era later, Hastert was a relatively quiet member of the leadership who enjoyed goodwill generally in the rank and file. Hastert was speaker through the last two Clinton years and first six of the George W. Bush presidency. But he voluntarily resigned after the GOP lost badly in the 2006 midterms, a defeat Bush called "a thumpin' " at the time. Just such a "motion to vacate the chair" was filed against Johnson in March by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga.
Bipartisan lawmakers "interacted more this week than we have in the last four years," GOP congressman says
His elevation to speaker from such a low-level post is extremely rare and reminiscent of former Illinois Republican Rep. Denny Hastert's rise in 1999 from chief deputy whip to speaker, in the wake of Georgia Republican Rep. Newt Gingrich's resignation as speaker. "He's a really nice guy. He's a true family man. He's a man of faith, gets along with everybody. It doesn't mean he's not principled or conservative — clearly he is," LaHood said in an interview. "But I think he was viewed as the least objectionable person in the process, and he was in the right place at the right time."
But in accepting the Democratic nomination for speaker, Jeffries rattled off moments when America's democracy was tested, including when thousands of Trump supporters attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6 in a bid to stop Congress' certification of Biden's victory. Stefanik made the argument that Johnson is the best candidate as "we live in perilous times and the American people are hurting." "Hakeem Jeffries has not turned his back on the will of the American people. The son of two social workers, he's always stood by the side of working families. The most pressing needs of everyday Americans are his north star." Voting will be done verbally with members called by name alphabetically and then stating their choice for speaker. If a member doesn’t vote, they will get a chance to vote at the end of the roll call. Before the vote Wednesday, numerous members of Congress said they knew little about Johnson, with some Republican senators saying they had never even met him.
House chamber mood is chipper and lively ahead of speaker vote
He has also 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 any new speaker will have to navigate in the coming days. Instead, he moved quickly to bring up a resolution expressing solidarity and support for Israel. His next order of business, he said, would be addressing what he called the country’s “broken border” with Mexico.
Who is Mike Johnson, the new Republican US House Speaker? - Reuters
Who is Mike Johnson, the new Republican US House Speaker?.
Posted: Thu, 26 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
In April 2018, Ryan said he would not serve another term and left as the party was losing its majority that fall. Johnson is the sixth Republican elevated to the speakership since 1994, the year the party won its first House majority and elected a speaker of its own for the first time in 40 years. The hard truth is that the five who preceded Johnson (McCarthy, Paul Ryan, John Boehner, Dennis Hastert and Newt Gingrich) all saw their time in the office end in relative degrees of defeat or frustration. And to find a Republican speaker who left voluntarily in a moment of victory, moving on to another office, you have to go back to the mid-1920s.
It was a significant decision considering that Johnson has slow-walked the aid package and remained noncommittal about a path forward until just this week. Following his work on George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign, he was appointed special assistant to the labor secretary in 2001, according to his congressional bio. In 2004, at age 29, he was elected to Congress, becoming one of the youngest lawmakers at that time.
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. 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. Becoming speaker of the House has been a career ambition for McCarthy, who served as a House staffer and a minority leader of the California Assembly in Sacramento before being elected to the House in 2006.
Representative Mike Johnson, a little-known social conservative from Louisiana, emerged on Tuesday night as the latest contender for the post after Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the No. 3 House Republican, dropped his bid only hours after securing the nomination. Mr. Emmer’s downfall followed a swift backlash from the right, including former President Donald J. Trump, that left his candidacy in shambles and the G.O.P. as divided as ever. He once shared the story with a mostly Democratic audience at a congressional hearing on slavery reparations, and he was surprised to hear boos as he spoke, he later recounted to the Council for National Policy, an assembly of conservative donors known for its strict secrecy. Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 House Republican and the first to be nominated for speaker following Mr. McCarthy’s ouster, was ultimately seen as insufficiently pro-Trump by too many of his colleagues. Mr. Johnson was only able to emerge as his party’s nominee for speaker this week after three other G.O.P. nominees before him were unable to rally enough support. 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.
While Jean-Pierre isn’t going anywhere, the issues that brought about Dunn’s failed machinations remain — with both sources saying the press secretary is too reliant on notes to provide the pushback and quick-thinking repartee needed to effectively champion Biden’s cause. Jean-Pierre’s predecessor, Jen Psaki, was press secretary for one week shy of 16 months before leaving to take a job as a host and analyst at MSNBC. “There were a number of people she asked to engage Karine,” said one source who heard of the strategy directly from Dunn, whose role as senior adviser has been filled during the past three presidencies by Jared Kushner (Donald Trump), Valerie Jarrett (Barack Obama) and Karl Rove (George W. Bush).
At one point, Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Alabama, had to be restrained after stepping toward Mr. Gaetz. Jeffries now leads the minority party in the House, succeeding California's Nancy Pelosi, who served as speaker in the prior session of Congress when Democrats held the majority. In addition to being the first Black lawmaker to attain such a position, Jeffries is also the first person elected to lead House Democrats to be born after the end of World War II. Clark’s ascension to a top House leadership position comes less than 10 years after she entered Congress representing Massachusetts’ 5th Congressional District, a Democratic stronghold outside Boston.
In exchange, when the clerk read the roll call on the 12th ballot Friday, 13 of the 20 conservative rebels switched their votes to McCarthy, handing him a surge of momentum after a grueling week of defeats. Late on Friday night, just as it appeared that Mr. McCarthy was finally going to win the speaker’s gavel that had eluded him for so long, it was suddenly yanked away from him at the last minute, in a highly charged moment on the House floor when his few remaining adversaries refused to bow. Talking with reporters, he gamely brushed off the notion that his historic and humiliating slog to election — the most protracted such contest since 1859 — foretold any troubles ahead for him in governing with an unruly and narrow majority. While it was long before the dawn of Twitter, super PACs and C-SPAN, things really haven’t changed all that much in Congress. She told The Hill shortly after starting the job that she had taken diction classes to prepare and had done a three-minute audition that involved reading out a resolution, amendment, handwritten amendment, presidential message and bill. 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.
And he will need to lead a conference deeply divided over foreign policy as Congress considers the Biden administration’s $105 billion funding request for Israel, Ukraine and the southern border. In a speech that traced his ascent up the political ladder in Louisiana to Congress, Mr. Johnson pledged to try to “restore the people’s faith in this House.” He cited sending aid to Israel, fixing a “broken” southern border, and reining in federal spending as his top legislative priorities. "That was a very tense moment, and I was just trying to play a role to keep the tensions down," Hudson said as he left the floor. In his acceptance speech, McCarthy promised that the House would be a check on President Joe Biden and his policies. The California Republican’s narrow victory came on the 15th ballot — the fifth-longest speaker vote in American history by number of ballots, and the longest such vote in 164 years. Lisa Desjardins is a correspondent for PBS NewsHour, where she covers news from the U.S.
Representative Ken Buck of Colorado said that Mr. Johnson was not involved in postelection efforts to invalidate the results, even though Mr. Johnson was a critical player in those activities. Mainstream conservatives who backed Mr. Johnson said they hoped to quickly move to pull the House out of its funk. Almost immediately after Mr. Johnson was elected, lawmakers began debating a resolution expressing solidarity with Israel and condemning Hamas, which passed overwhelmingly. 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. Moments earlier, McCarthy himself had walked from his seat, down the center aisle to Gaetz and Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., to try to flip their present votes to yes; that would have secured the speaker’s gavel for McCarthy.
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