As expected, a majority of the House Republican caucus decided on Rep. Steve Scalise as their candidate for House Speaker rather than Rep. Jim Jordan, a direct repudiation of Trump's endorsement (everything he touches still turns to shit though). But the concept of Scalise getting 218 votes however still looks very elusive.
House Republicans on Wednesday nominated Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) to be the next Speaker, sending his candidacy to the House floor following Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) stunning ouster last week, multiple lawmakers told The Hill.
Scalise secured the nomination 113-99 in a closed-door GOP conference meeting, defeating House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) in a close race that did not have a clear front-runner heading into the internal vote.
Scalise will now take his candidacy to the House floor, where he will be up against House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), who Democrats nominated for Speaker on Tuesday night.
The floor fight could get messy. Candidates need the support of a majority of the chamber to take control of the gavel and Republicans hold a razor-thin majority. McCarthy required 15 rounds of voting to secure the gavel.
Multiple Republicans have already said they won’t vote for Scalise on the floor and others remained non-committal.
Jordan, however, said he offered to deliver a nominating speech on Scalise’s behalf.
Scalise’s nomination marks the pinnacle of his congressional career, which began in 2008 and has spanned more than nine years in leadership, including stints as Republican whip and, most recently, majority leader.
Throughout the week-long race for the top spot, Scalise branded himself as the Republican who could unite the conference following McCarthy’s ouster, which bitterly divided the GOP and inflamed tensions within the party.
“I’ve got a long history of bringing people together, uniting Republicans, focusing on the issues that we’ve got to do to address the issues we came here to do to get our country back on track,” Scalise told Fox Business in an interview Tuesday.
Yeah, let's have a little chat about Steve, shall we? Remember how he spoke at a white supremacist hoedown with fellow Louisiana trash beast David Duke in 2014? ZVTS remembers, as does CNN.
The story has all the traits of a career-ending political scandal:
A congressman who recently snagged a top position in party leadership faces accusations that he addressed a hate group run by a notorious white supremacist. And all of that, just a week before his party is set to take the reigns of power in Congress.
But the fast rising career of Republican Rep. Steve Scalise, who was tapped as House Majority Whip this summer, may not be in the ditches just yet. There’s a lot to keep track of. Here’s what you need to know:
So what happened?
It turns out Scalise addressed an anti-Semitic, white supremacist group back in 2002 run by none other than David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Klu Klux Klan who is well-known in Scalise’s home state of Louisiana because of several statewide campaigns for governor and senator.
A liberal Louisiana politics blogger revealed the encounter with the European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO) after finding an account of Scalise’s speech to the group on a white supremacist forum.
The group is bad news for Scalise: it’s been labeled as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which details the group’s anti-semitic, racist views.
The next day, reporters in D.C. were asking Scalise’s office about the meeting and after aides first said it was “probable” and then “likely” the congressman spoke to the group, Scalise broke his silence in an interview with his local paper, The Times-Picayune of New Orleans.
He said he didn’t remember specifically addressing EURO, but said that at the time he “went and spoke to any group that called” in 2002 when he was trying to drum up support in opposing a state tax plan.
And then Scalise released the ultimate mea culpa statement Tuesday afternoon, calling his appearance at the event “a mistake I regret.”
“One of the many groups that I spoke to regarding this critical legislation was a group whose views I wholeheartedly condemn. It was a mistake I regret,” Scalise said.
That should have been the end of his career 9 years ago and now he's failed upward all the way to House Speaker, despite paling around with avowed racists and antisemites as Israel takes the American foreign policy stage. I bet there's going to be some fun phone calls this week between here and Tel Aviv.
In hindsight, a Republican in Congress who was chasing the neo-Nazi vote in 2014 was simply ahead of the curve for the rest of the party, and now he's going to get rewarded for it.
Well, eventually. Who knows how many votes it will take to get him elected?
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