Steve Scalise wins nod for House Speaker

Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), House Republican Leader, won the nomination for the Speakership today, according to Roll Call. He now faces a difficult full-House floor vote this afternoon.

Steve Scalise for Speaker

The Republican Leader won the nomination in a closed-door session of the House Republican Conference, 113-99. Earlier today, Reps. Chip Roy (R-Texas) and Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) moved to require 217 votes for a nomination. Another House Republican conferee whose name is unrecorded, moved to table. The motion to table passed, 135-88.

Steve Scalise must now raise 217 votes on the House floor, given the two vacancies now existing in the House. (The Rhode Island and Utah delegations have one vacancy each, from resignations.)

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who had led the fight to oust Kevin McCarthy from the Speakership, appeared grudgingly satisfied.

But Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) is definitely not.

Neither are many who replied to this post, who fear that Steve Scalise will continue McCarthy’s policies and attitudes.

Two users protested the closed-door session.

Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News posted about the “institutional advantages” Scalise enjoys.

Given the margins in the House, if Scalise loses more than four Republican votes, the House will be in deadlock. This, of course, happened before, when Kevin McCarthy was trying to become Speaker. McCarthy had to make many concessions before becoming Speaker on the fifteenth floor vote.

Prior claims to fame

Steve Scalise is famous for taking a bullet during a Congressional baseball game, and being down with plasma cell myeloma. The sexual trafficking of children might, or might not, be an important issue with him. (It was when a would-be assassin wounded him.) At the time of that fateful baseball game, many questions remained – such as why did so many of the would-be assassin’s bullets miss their marks? James T. Hodgkinson fired sixty rounds, and succeeded in wounding only four people with one round each. They were Steve Scalise himself, two Capitol Police officers, and an aide. No one yet knows what motive Hodgkinson might have had beyond simple partisan spite.