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The job is mostly administrative, with duties like certifying the passage of all bills and resolutions by the chamber. It has never before happened that anyone aside from a sitting member of the House was voted in as Speaker. On Thursday, a vote was cast not for Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader in the House of Representatives, nor for any other member of Congress, but for Donald Trump, the former US president.
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Trump says he's willing to be speaker for 'short period' if necessary - Spectrum News NY1
Trump says he's willing to be speaker for 'short period' if necessary.
Posted: Thu, 05 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
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Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene
So far, Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Steve Scalise (R-La.) have announced bids to succeed McCarthy. In the summer of 2021, Democratic Rep. Brendon Boyle introduced a bill that would have allowed only House members to serve as speaker. At the time, Trump called the idea that he might try to become speaker "so interesting." The bill did not become law. But the Constitution doesn't explicitly say that the speaker needs to be serving in the House, although so far, every one has been.
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"She didn't like when that January 6 guy was sitting in her chair in her office. She is sure not going to like seeing Donald Trump sitting in her chair." While, technically, he could still become House speaker while indicted, the effort required to engineer it makes the chances of it happening very thin. It’s an irony that shouldn’t be lost on Democrats who, by voting with a group of hard-right rebels earlier this week to expel McCarthy, paved at least the path for Trump to get there.
This is not an idle threat, given that there are 18 House Republicans serving in districts won by Joe Biden in 2020 who would think long and hard before voting for Trump for speaker. “It requires that you actually get to the office at a reasonable hour and deal with the kinds of factional disputes that he would rather fuel, rather than settle,” said C. Taylor Greene’s move to oust Johnson was supported by the Kentucky representative Thomas Massie, who also backed an ultimately successful attempt to remove a previous Republican speaker, John Boehner, nearly a decade ago. Branded “Moscow Marjorie” by former Republican representative Ken Buck, who said she gets her talking points from the Kremlin, Taylor Greene went further by accusing Ukraine of waging “a war against Christianity”.
Troy Nehls of Texas, Greg Steube of Florida, and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia—have already indicated that they will support the former president in voting to select a new House speaker. Both parties will need to state when they are ready to enter into the process of electing a new Speaker. It is unclear exactly when a new election for House Speaker will begin, as this will be the first time in U.S. history that such a vote will not be taking place at the start of a new Congress term. "This week, when the U.S. House of Representatives reconvenes, my first order of business will be to nominate Donald J. Trump for Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives," Nehls said in a statement.
“I’ll do whatever it is to help, but my total focus is on being president,” Trump recently said. However, Trump has enough on his plate and, with a 40-plus percentage point lead ahead of his party’s other candidates in the primaries, he’s already the prohibitive favourite to win the Republican nomination. And he’s focused on raising tens of millions of dollars just to finance his legal defence. With the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries coming up, snatching the speakership now would all but ensure that Trump continued to dominate the headlines, sucking up all the oxygen in the room, leaving his rivals flummoxed, and stroking his notorious ego. Some Republican lawmakers are already stating that they will be voting for former President Donald Trump to become House Speaker following the historic ousting of Kevin McCarthy from the role. Advocating for her press corps colleagues has become a second full-time job for NBC News' senior White House correspondent.
Capitol by the mob of Trump’s supporters trying to stop the certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s victory. On Friday, Trump and Johnson will appear for a press conference on “election integrity” at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago club, according to a Trump campaign official. “Once the House has met their responsibility to elect a speaker, [Biden] looks forward to working together with them and with the Senate to address the American people’s priorities,” press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement Tuesday.
Ahead of the 2022 midterms, with Republicans optimistic about retaking the House majority, there was considerable conversation about who might become the next House speaker. Part of the discussion acknowledged the fact that the speaker doesn’t have to be a sitting member of the institution, which in turn led some to suggest Donald Trump should hold the gavel. A few Republicans have voted "present" so far, making it slightly easier for Mr McCarthy to get a majority - but not enough to make a real difference. They set the House's legislative agenda, control committee assignments, set the vote and work calendar, and are responsible for keeping their party members unified behind major initiatives.
Trump’s legal woes, which include two federal indictments, could also play a role in his thought process. Trump has frequently pointed to his position as a presidential candidate as a reason the Justice Department should not be prosecuting him, including that he lacks the time to attend a trial or participate in his own defense. Should he be named speaker of the House, Trump could again try to invoke his position to argue that his trial should be delayed. One of the obvious problems with this scenario is that being House speaker is an incredibly difficult and time-consuming job, which Trump would absolutely hate.
He went on to note that despite being similar in age, the two presidential hopefuls have little else in common. Chants accused U.S. journalists of undercovering the war and misrepresenting it. “Western media we see you, and all the horrors that you hide,” crowds chanted at one point. With hundreds of protesters rallying against the war in Gaza outside the event and concerns over the conflict and humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the perils for journalists covering the conflict, the war hung over this year’s event. But speakers inside made only passing mention of the conflict despite some having to run a gauntlet of demonstrators. Biden’s speech, which lasted around 10 minutes, made no mention of the ongoing war or the growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
Nehls was not among the eight Republicans who voted to give former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) the boot, but he is generally aligned with the hardliners. Trump has 91 criminal counts pending against him spanning four indictments, with potential penalties totaling more than 400 years behind bars. “A member of the Republican Leadership shall step aside if indicted for a felony for which a sentence of two or more years’ imprisonment may be imposed,” the Conference Rules of the 118th Congress say. Now that there’s an opening, a handful of House Republicans are calling for it and the former president is both publicly and privately toying with the idea. Fortunately, it does not appear we will have to resolve this question any time soon.
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