Tom Emmer wins House Speaker nomination

The House Republican Conference, on its fifth ballot, nominated Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), Majority Whip, for Speaker of the House. Announcements broke on X and elsewhere at 12:15 p.m. EDT, give or take five minutes.

Tom Emmer wins – but controversy dogs his tracks

Just the News reports the vote for Tom Emmer was remarkably close: 117-97. Emmer beat Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) in that final vote. Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), Speaker pro tempore, has not yet announced when he will call the House to vote.

Emmer was one of ten declared candidates, all of whom pledged in writing to support the eventual winner. Rep. Mike Flood (R-Neb.) wrote the pledge for all candidates to sign. But no one has yet said how many other members of the Conference signed such a pledge.

The top four vote-getters on the first three ballots were Tom Emmer, Mike Johnson, Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Okla.), and Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.). The fourth ballot eliminated Kern, who came in fourth. After that, Byron Donalds dropped out of the race, leaving only Emmer and Johnson on the fifth ballot.

Promptly at 12:15 p.m., Rep Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) offered her congratuations:

Mary Margaret Olohan of The Daily Signal reported much the same, then added another element. Former President Donald J . Trump quipped that only Jesus Christ could win all the votes.

Apparently the Democratic leadership in the House said Tom Emmer was “the least obnoxious” of the Speaker candidates. According to this post, some leaders have offered to “sit the vote out,” in exchange for guarantees of:

• Funding of all government functions at the levels specified in the debt ceiling deal, and
• Bringing to the floor a military aid package for Ukraine and Israel.

A possible reason

Substack columnist J. D. Rucker speculated on why Tom Emmer won the nod. After calling Emmer “an anti-Trump UniParty Swamp RINO,” he suggested that certain persons unknown, who run “the swamp” behind the scenes, have compromised Emmer more thoroughly than they have any other candidate for the Speakership.

He is already known to have called openly for amending the Constitution to provide for direct national popular election of Presidents and Vice-Presidents. Emmer is also suspected of helping Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) sabotage Trump-supporting candidates in their primaries. When they won anyway, the leadership let them lose their general election campaigns. That theory states that the leadership would have been just fine staying in the minority last Midterms.

Update

This post lists several Republican Representatives still opposed to Tom Emmer: