The Patriot Post® · House Speakership: It's Déjà vu All Over Again

It’s about the math. And the math isn’t on Steve Scalise’s side. At least not yet.

Scalise, the Republican House majority leader, beat Judiciary Chairman and Freedom Caucus cofounder Jim Jordan by a slim 113-99 margin Wednesday in the House GOP’s internal vote to nominate a speaker. That’s a long, long way from the 217 votes (two of the House’s 435 members are absent) that he’ll need to become speaker.

“It’s important that we’re back functioning again as the House of Representatives,” said Jordan after the vote, “and we need a speaker. And Steve is the guy for that. I think it’s important that we come together, and I’ve offered to nominate Steve on the House floor.”

Scalise is battling cancer, but he clearly thinks he’s up to the challenge of the speakership. And yet even with the magnanimous Jordan throwing his support behind him, it’s not at all clear that Scalise can get the votes he needs to become speaker. As The Hill reports, “At least seven Republicans say they plan to back someone other than Scalise; at least six others say they are undecided; and some have declined to comment on who they will stand behind — enough resistance to deny Scalise the speakership on the House floor.”

It’s even more fraught than that, though. A number of Republicans said they were going to support Jordan on the floor vote, apparently whether he liked it or not. Having postponed its Wednesday afternoon floor vote, the House is scheduled to reconvene at noon today, but it’s not clear whether it will hold a floor vote for speaker at that time.

Across the House GOP conference prior to the internal vote, the rule or tradition or agreement or general consensus was that if you got the votes in the conference, you’d get the votes on the floor when it comes time to elect the speaker. But things clearly aren’t working out that way. At least not yet.

“I’m a hard ‘no,’” said Texas Congressman Chip Roy, “because it was rushed.” Roy, a Freedom Caucus colleague of Jordan, was referring to House leadership’s effort to ram through a floor vote just 90 minutes after the tightly contested internal vote between Scalise and Jordan.

“I have a concern he doesn’t have the votes to get to 218,” said Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie, “so we should probably resolve that before we go to the floor.”

It’s fair to say that the Scalise-Jordan vote was a proxy for Donald Trump’s support within the GOP House conference. Trump, after all, very publicly and enthusiastically threw his support behind Jordan last week. So while Trump is running away with the Republican presidential primary, leading his nearest challenger, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, by a 58-13 margin in the RealClearPolitics average, the GOP House doesn’t seem to be nearly as pro-Trump as the folks who elected them.

If Scalise can’t get the votes, the next question should be whether Jordan can. That is, is the resistance to Jordan as strong as the resistance to Scalise? If not, perhaps Jordan can yet prevail.

Scalise is well regarded, and his story of survival is humbling. In addition to his current battle with blood cancer, he was shot and nearly killed on a DC-area ball field in 2017 by a deranged leftist in what the disgracefully politicized FBI tried to whitewash as a “death by cop” incident.

Our sense, though, is that Jordan is the better choice, the more conservative choice, for this particular moment. His work ethic — that of a two-time NCAA wrestling champion — is impressive, and his conservative credentials are unimpeachable.

Wisconsin Republican Mike Gallagher spelled out the predicament caused by the speakership vacancy: “If we can’t confirm a speaker, we can’t do anything. We can’t pass a bill providing aid to Israel. We can’t pass a bill that would ban or force the sale of TikTok. All the important things we need to get done cannot happen in the absence of a speaker. So I get it. We have a narrow majority. People are frustrated with the status quo in Congress. But we are paralyzed unless we have a speaker, and people have to compromise, we have to coalesce around someone. There’s no perfect candidate, but absent a speaker, we can do nothing in the House of Representatives.”

Gallagher is certainly right about that narrow majority. But the status-quo frustration he spoke about is spelled out by Virginia’s Bob Good, one of the eight Republicans who joined with the entire Democrat caucus to oust former Speaker Kevin McCarthy 10 days ago: “Steve Scalise is just more of the same, like Kevin McCarthy.”

Today marks the tenth day that the U.S. hasn’t had a speaker of the House, and the sky hasn’t fallen. Still, former speaker Newt Gingrich’s frustration is coming to the surface. “It’s still uphill,” he said, “but I think Republicans have to come together and realize, whether it’s Scalise or somebody else — and Steve’s a great guy, he’s been a good majority leader, he’s a solid conservative — somebody has to get 217 votes, and the House has to get its act together under our Constitution because the world’s dangerous, and people like Hamas are not hanging around waiting for the House Republicans.”

It’s understandable that Gingrich, who at bottom is an institutionalist, weighed in on behalf of Scalise and on behalf of getting back to business. We suspect Fox News’s Sean Hannity raised a good point: “There was an opportunity for the Republican caucus … to vote in conference, together, as a unit, that they would not leave unless they [had] the votes for a speaker. That was voted down. That seemed like a pretty commonsensical type of rule.”

And yet, as Fox News’s Capitol Hill correspondent Chad Pergram rightly noted, “There’s a reason why Kevin McCarthy took five days and 15 rounds to become speaker back in January.”

Perhaps, at some point, the entire GOP House conference will have to lock itself in a room and subsist on carry-out until they can figure this out, until they can agree on Scalise or Jordan.