Chaffetz noted that the House election for speaker requires a winning candidate to obtain a majority – 218 votes if all 435 members are present and vote. Ironically, Boehner may have tried to help them, although for his own reasons: He met last week with Trey Gowdy, of South Carolina, the chairman of the select committee investigating the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack, who is popular with conservatives, and reportedly recruited him as a majority-leader candidate to protect McCarthy’s right wing should McCarthy become speaker.
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While Boehner gets criticism from all quarters of his party, those Republicans who identify as part of the Tea Party (just over one in five of all Republicans today) are especially negative.
“There is also widespread interest in considering a change in internal party rules that would force candidates to resign chairmanships and leadership slots to run for new office”, Politico wrote, adding that there is “serious unrest in the House Republican Conference, and delaying the elections might give more time for the mood to settle, according to sources involved in the planning”. Chaffetz, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, has fervently opposed encryption backdoors as he has sought to make law-enforcement and intelligence agencies more accountable to the American people.
“I’m very Margaret Thatcher that way”, he said. “It’s grown and expanded because we want to get to truth”. “We in the House have passed hundreds of bills addressing so many different topics since January that haven’t been voted on in the Senate, they haven’t been sent to the President’s desk for his action”. As head of the oversight panel, Chaffetz led the investigations into the Secret Service’s numerous and well-publicized security failures, the most serious of which was a man jumping the White House fence and entering the building last fall.
During his announcement, Chaffetz asserted he can be the peacemaker.
Fleming has said that for existing members of leadership to simply get a promotion – a circumstance that would describe the advances that McCarthy and Scalise hope for – is unacceptable, although he endorsed Scalise’s candidacy Monday.
McCarthy, R-Calif., who is expected to benefit from the extra time as he works to shore up support if he is anointed the nominee, will have his best chance to convince skeptical members at a conservative “audition” on Tuesday. It’s not something that was driven by Jason Chaffetz. “I recognize technology can be a double-edged sword and many pose challenges for law enforcement, but we’re certainly not going to go dark, and in many ways we’ve never been brighter”. In the Speaker’s election in 1856, lawmakers cast 133 ballots over a two-month period before finally settling on Massachusetts Rep. Nathaniel Banks. I want to solve this problem.
The decision is up to the speaker’s office – and so far, no delays have been announced.
And complicating matters is the fact that McCarthy has slipped up on his way out the gate.
“All of the above served to reduce the opportunity for the average member to influence the process”.
“I don’t care about personality-who the speaker is”, Mulvaney, R-S.C., said. Exactly what their fight will look like “is kind of fluid”, says Rep. Matt Salmon (R) of Arizona, another caucus founder.
“I fear they foretell a lot of dysfunction as we move forward”, said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA).
In the days immediately following, McCarthy was viewed as the presumptive favorite to replace the outgoing speaker, who quickly endorsed his No. 2.
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Renacci said he has a simple question for the next speaker: “What are we going to be doing different?” he said.
