Breaking: McCarthy Loses 12th Round in Speaker Fight, but Gains Votes

janvier 06, 2023

GOP leader Kevin McCarthy failed in an 12th attempt for the speakership on Friday but flipped 14 Republican detractors, appearing to confirm that talks between the factions are progressing as was announced earlier in the day.

Fourteen Republican hold-outs, including Representatives Brecheen, Bishop, Cloud, Clyde, Donalds, Luna, Miller, Norman, Perry, Roy, Self, Spartz, Gosar, and Ogles voted for McCarthy on the 12th vote for the position. McCarthy won a total of 214 votes during this ballot, according to C-SPAN’s unofficial tally.

In his statement on changing his vote to McCarthy, obtained by Politico, Self said: “My vote today was to show support for significant Rule changes to transform the House from being dysfunctional to functional. I believe we are on the precipice of transferring significant power from leadership to individual members and the American people.”

This round, Representative Matt Gaetz, a staunch McCarthy opponent, nominated his colleague Jim Jordan, to whom anti-McCarthy congressman Biggs tossed his support. Gaetz nominated former president Trump during the eleventh round after doing the same on the seventh and eighth ballots.

McCarthy announced earlier Friday that negotiations over the House speakership had been approaching an agreement although he did not confirm a deal. He assured that the members had been working “hard” and in “good faith,” according to Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News.

“I’m not telling you we have an agreement, I am telling you we are in a good position,” McCarthy told members on a House GOP conference call, Politico reported.

The House voted Thursday night to adjourn and reconvene on Friday at noon after McCarthy failed in an eleventh attempt for the speakership, the first time in 164 years that the vote went to nine rounds. The House voted five times on Thursday alone.

Representative Chip Roy is one of the leaders of the House rebels that have lobbied for more power on the important Rules Committee, the last checkpoint for bills before they advance to the House floor. Bloomberg reported that “hard-line conservatives want to claim four of the nine [Republican] seats on the House Rules Committee, which would give them outsized influence on what does — and what does not — get debated on the House floor.”

During the conference call, Representative McHenry reportedly said that Roy would not be chair of the Rules Committee, Sherman said.

On Thursday, Roy told National Review that he would not specify what number of seats he and other anti-McCarthy Republicans are demanding on the 13-seat panel. “That number has been floated in some previous conversations,” he added.

GOP Representative Ken Buck, who Politico claimed would return to Congress Friday to vote after it was rumored he’d be away for a medical appointment, had publicly suggested he’d withdraw his support for McCarthy unless he secured a deal.

“Well, I've had a number of conversations with Kevin, and I just basically told him that at some point this needs to break loose. He either needs to make a deal to bring the 19 or 20 over, or he needs to step aside and give somebody a chance to do that,” Buck said on “CNN Newsroom.”

GOP Representative-elect Wesley Hunt, a McCarthy vote, flew back home to Texas Friday morning, a source with the details reportedly told Politico, absenting himself from the speakership vote proceedings to meet his newborn child.