Vote Count: Mike Johnson Elected House Speaker After Three-Week Vacancy The New York Times

Table Of Content

• California holds the key to GOP power in the House. McCarthy’s retirement makes everything harder
• With Johnson, Republicans are rallying behind one of the staunchest religious conservatives in the House.
• Majority Leader
• Officers and Organizations
• Swing-district Republican attacks Democrats who heckled him over his support for Johnson
• Goldberg: The latest sign that Republicans are abandoning even their most deeply held principles
• UT Austin Police give "all clear" for dispersal order as authorities arrest more than 30 protesters

CNN reported that Mr. Trump also called Representative Andy Biggs, who switched from voting against Mr. McCarthy to voting “present” on the 15th round. Even by the heated standards of the tensions that flared among House Republicans during their four-day push to elect a speaker, what happened on the House floor around 11 p.m. The prolonged election prompted tension and uncertainty in the Capitol, where lawmakers in both parties had grown impatient and bored awaiting the outcome of a high-stakes struggle that seemed at once monumental and absurd. “The motion to vacate is accountability,” he added, referring to the measure allowing a snap vote to remove the speaker. Friday night, Mr. McCarthy remained one vote short of what he needed to seal the deal.

California holds the key to GOP power in the House. McCarthy’s retirement makes everything harder

Johnson was sworn in as the 56th House speaker soon after winning the vote and delivering a speech to lawmakers in the House chamber. "We're going to dispense with all the usual ceremonies and celebrations that traditionally follow a new speakership because we have no time for either one," Johnson said. "The American people's business is too urgent in this moment. The hour is late. The crisis is great." Johnson, a little-known lawmaker who is now second in line for the presidency, attracted the support of all 220 Republican members in attendance, surpassing the 215-vote total that was required to win.

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With Johnson, Republicans are rallying behind one of the staunchest religious conservatives in the House.

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. Exhausted from the feuding, which unleashed a barrage of recriminations and violent threats against lawmakers, both the right wing and mainstream Republicans finally united to elect Mr. Johnson, 51, in a 220-to-209 vote. But the speech infuriated Mr. Trump, and Mr. McCarthy quickly worked to get back in the former president’s good graces, traveling to his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, three weeks later to meet with him. But after former President Donald J. Trump placed phone calls to a group of key holdouts, and a frenzied round of haggling on the House floor, Mr. McCarthy was broadly grinning again. Representative Chip Roy of Texas started out as an enthusiastic supporter of Mr. Trump’s claims of a stolen election but gradually grew alarmed about the push to invalidate the results and ultimately opposed Mr. Trump’s bid to get Congress to overturn them on Jan. 6, 2021.

Majority Leader

As set out under the Constitution, the session will begin at noon Jan. 3, with all the lawmakers seated on the House floor and members from both parties joining in the vote for speaker. Republican U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy is set to face a case of deja vu come Tuesday. The political future of the 57-year-old will once again be at stake as GOP lawmakers decide whether he should be elected as House speaker.

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But even more than his election denialism, Mr. Johnson’s political career has been defined by his religious views. “The slates of electors were produced by a clearly unconstitutional process, period,” he said. In December 2020, Mr. Johnson collected signatures for a legal brief in support of a Texas lawsuit, rooted in baseless claims of widespread election irregularities, that tried to throw out the results in four battleground states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr. A social conservative, Mr. Johnson played a leading role in recruiting House Republicans to sign a legal brief supporting a lawsuit seeking to overturn the results. “This affirms the path that we took,” Representative Bob Good of Virginia, one of the eight Republicans who voted to oust former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, tells reporters. “We went through a lot to get here, but we are ready to govern and that will begin right away,” Johnson says in his first news conference as speaker.

Officers and Organizations

The dissidents praised the protracted debate that spotlighted their party’s rifts, made it impossible for legislative business to be conducted and threatened the timely issuance of paychecks on Capitol Hill. Left unmentioned was that many of the same rebels who helped lead the effort in Congress to overturn the 2020 election, giving rise to the assault that day, were also among the final holdouts working to block Mr. McCarthy’s ascent. Representative Victoria Spartz of Indiana, who had voted “present” in previous ballots, also voted for Mr. McCarthy in the 12th vote. A photographer was among those arrested during clashes between protesters and law enforcement on the University of Texas at Austin campus on Wednesday.

Republicans had cast aside two previous winners of their closed-door nominating process — Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana and Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio — before settling on Mr. Emmer. Pressed by reporters on Tuesday night about his efforts to overturn the election, Mr. Johnson smiled and shook his head, saying, “next question,” as Republicans beside him booed. House Republicans chose and then quickly repudiated yet another of their nominees for speaker on Tuesday and rushed to name a fourth, pressing to put an end to a remarkable three-week-long deadlock that has left Congress leaderless and paralyzed.

Biden and McCarthy will have to find compromise come January, when the GOP takes control of the House of Representatives and the Bakersfield Republican is expected to secure the Speaker’s gavel. California Rep. Kevin McCarthy has no business in Congress’ highest office or the presidential line of succession. Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi celebrates a $400 million investment from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law for the Golden Gate Bridge to bolster its resiliency to earthquakes with Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Special Advisor to the President Mitch Landrieu and local leaders. The Bridge Investment Program from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law delivers $12.5 billion to build, repair and replace key bridges across the country. Speaker Emerita Pelosi celebrated with staff in the Speaker’s Lobby after the passage of the Affordable Care Act in the House of Representatives.

Others railed against Mr. Emmer’s vote in favor of a stopgap spending bill put forward by Mr. McCarthy, the speaker at the time, to avert a government shutdown. Still others said he was insufficiently loyal to Mr. Trump, because he voted to certify the results of the 2020 election won by President Biden. Historically, there have been several controversial elections to the speakership, such as the contest of 1839. In that case, even though the 26th United States Congress convened on December 2, the House could not begin the speakership election until December 14 because of an election dispute in New Jersey known as the "Broad Seal War". Two rival delegations, one Whig and the other Democrat, had been certified as elected by different branches of the New Jersey government.

Mr. Johnson has 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 he will have to navigate in the coming days. Evoking his evangelical Christian faith, Mr. Johnson repeatedly referred to scripture in his speech from the House floor. They also were unhappy that he had suggested in an interview on Fox News that the House committee investigating the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, had the political aim of damaging Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. The practice of earmarking — where a single lawmaker can use a sliver of the sprawling government budget to send money to a specific project in his or her state — has been both embraced and reviled over the years.

Emmer voted to certify the 2020 election results after Jan. 6, 2021, but signed onto an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to overturn the presidential election results. Trump seemed to acknowledge his role in killing Emmer's quest for the gavel, as he shared on his social media platform an article from Politico about how the former president "torpedoed" the bid. Former President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social, his social media site, early Wednesday to urge House Republicans to back Johnson for speaker, less than a day after he effectively derailed Majority Whip Tom Emmer's own bid for the gavel.

Johnson has gained stature and won bipartisan praise for letting the whole House vote on the aid package. He also got strong support in the Senate, where even an outright majority of Republicans voted for the aid on Tuesday. As Rep. Jim Jordan meets with a number of allies in hopes of swaying key holdouts to his speakership bid, GOP sources say his opposition could grow if the votes continue over multiple rounds of ballots. In a letter to colleagues earlier Wednesday, Johnson outlined his first priority will be trying to pass the remaining spending bills that have so far languished in the House one by one. But Johnson indicated that given the time constraints, if those bills can’t pass quickly, he’d look to fund to government using what is known as a short-term spending bill or continuing resolution that would run either through January 15 or April 15, whichever the conference supports.

Fourteen of those Democrats voted on Saturday in favor of aid to Israel, while 12 Democrats who voted to allow the package on the floor on Friday then cast votes against the funding itself. More than seven years later, he is the party’s nominee for speaker after leading the Republican Party to a slim majority in the November midterm elections. He secured the support of most of the conference during a closed-door leadership vote shortly after and overcame a challenge from Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.). If the House speaker election has felt endless to you, take a second to imagine the experiences of the chamber’s reading clerks — the two people who have read out the names of every representative in attendance, and recorded their votes, 13 times now, with a 14th expected Friday night. Also part of the proposal, Republicans familiar with it said, was a commitment by the leader to give the ultraconservative faction approval over a third of the seats on the powerful Rules Committee, which controls what legislation reaches the floor and how it is debated. He also agreed to open government spending bills to a freewheeling debate in which any lawmaker could force votes on proposed changes.

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. 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.

The House passed a long-stalled foreign aid package on Saturday that gives funding to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, with a majority of lawmakers backing money for American allies across the globe. 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. Passing each bill, in votes expected Saturday, will require Johnson to form complicated bipartisan coalitions on each, with Democrats for example ensuring Ukraine aid is approved, but some left-leaning progressives refusing to back military aid for Israel over the destruction of Gaza. Still, Jeffries said that a majority of Democrats would vote Saturday for the packages of aid for Ukraine, Israel and allies in Asia.

GOP lawmakers who withheld their support for Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio during his three rounds of voting on the House floor are beginning to line up behind Johnson. Johnson now faces a daunting list of challenges, with a fast-approaching government shutdown chief among them. The House is staring down a deadline of Nov. 17, when current government funding expires. In his blueprint for the next few months, Johnson said a stopgap measure extending funding until January or April may be needed to approve more spending and avoid a shutdown. The House has been in a state of uncertainty and chaos since Oct. 3, when rebels forced a vote to oust Mr. McCarthy as speaker. Eight Republicans backed that move along with Democrats, who remained united behind their own leader, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York.