Saturday, April 27, 2024

Opinion: Speaker Mike Johnson sings 'Kumbaya' with the Democrats Los Angeles Times

house of reps speaker

Born in Gastonia, North Carolina, McHenry received a bachelor’s degree in history from Belmont Abbey College and started his career in politics in 1998 after launching a failed bid for the North Carolina state House of Representatives. Under McCarthy, McHenry was also deployed as a top negotiator for House Republicans in securing an agreement with the White House to prevent the US from defaulting for the first time in history. Gaetz also defended fundraising off of the vote today, saying he was the only Republican member of Congress who rejected money from PACs and lobbyists. Elected by the whole of the House of Representatives, the Speaker acts as leader of the House and combines several institutional and administrative roles.

Partisan role

house of reps speaker

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. An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the political party of a group of representatives who notably voted “no” on new aid for Israel. Echoing one of the many grievances shared by hard-right Republicans who opposed all of the aid measures, Mr. Good said his support for “Israel’s right to defend itself remains unshakeable” but that he disagreed with a measure that would add to the nation’s debt. 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. The package, which now goes to the Senate, is almost certain to become law.

Votes on the Foreign Aid Bills

The congressman temporarily leading the House of Representatives as interim speaker is a top ally of Kevin McCarthy, who was ousted Tuesday from the speaker’s chair. Information about any legal expenses incurred by a candidate or current representative. Information about certain expenditures for all official foreign travel by representatives and staff. You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times. A leader on conservation and the environment at home and abroad, Pelosi authored legislation to create the Presidio Trust and transform San Francisco’s former military post into an urban national park.

List of speakers of the United States House of Representatives[change change source]

This marks a clear departure from how those same members viewed former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s decision earlier this month to put a short-term spending bill on the floor, which ultimately led to his ouster. GOP Rep. Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma is considering a run for conference vice chair – the leadership role previously occupied by now-Speaker Mike Johnson, according to her spokesperson. 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. Late on Friday night, just as it appeared that Mr. McCarthy was finally going to win the speaker’s gavel that had eluded him for so long, it was suddenly yanked away from him at the last minute, in a highly charged moment on the House floor when his few remaining adversaries refused to bow. 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. Congress banned the practice more than a decade ago, after a series of scandals tied to earmarks and anti-spending fervor swept through the institution with the rise of the Tea Party, but it has since reintroduced it with more guardrails.

House conservatives are signaling they’ll give the newly minted House Speaker Mike Johnson some runway and flexibility as the House barrels toward a November 17 spending deadline to fund the government. The relationship fissured after Jan. 6, 2021, when pro-Trump rioters attacked the Capitol stoked by lies of a stolen election, and Mr. McCarthy delivered a speech on the House floor condemning Mr. Trump’s role. Under pressure to step aside when there appeared to be no chance that he could clinch the speaker’s gavel, he hung on anyway. “He will have to live the entirety of his speakership in a straitjacket constructed by the rules that we’re working on now,” Mr. Gaetz said. Talking with reporters, he gamely brushed off the notion that his historic and humiliating slog to election — the most protracted such contest since 1859 — foretold any troubles ahead for him in governing with an unruly and narrow majority. WASHINGTON — They helped lead the efforts to keep former President Donald J. Trump in power after he lost the 2020 election.

Hastert was speaker through the last two Clinton years and first six of the George W. Bush presidency. But he voluntarily resigned after the GOP lost badly in the 2006 midterms, a defeat Bush called "a thumpin' " at the time. The No. 2 Republican at the time did not have the votes, and the No. 3 declined to run. The chairman of the Appropriations Committee was nominated by the party conference but withdrew after a magazine story accused him of marital infidelity. Just such a "motion to vacate the chair" was filed against Johnson in March by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. But Greene has yet to make the motion "privileged," which under the rules would necessitate a vote within two days.

How long was the House without a speaker? - NBC News

How long was the House without a speaker?.

Posted: Wed, 25 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

Mainstream conservatives who backed Mr. Johnson said they hoped to quickly move to pull the House out of its funk. Almost immediately after Mr. Johnson was elected, lawmakers began debating a resolution expressing solidarity with Israel and condemning Hamas, which passed overwhelmingly. Democrats were scathing in their assessment of Mr. Johnson’s ascent to the speakership.

Architect of the Capitol

Usually when control of the White House, Senate and House is divided between the parties, Democrats and Republicans firmly exercise their respective levers of power, until one side relents or both compromise. When a House majority is united, it can run over the minority, and maximize its leverage against the Senate or White House. The list of the 10 speakers who served in the job longest includes just one Republican (and in the ninth slot at that). That speaker was Joseph G. Cannon of Illinois, notorious as the autocratic "Czar Cannon" during three two-year tours as speaker that ended with his party's historic defeat in 1910. His predecessor, Frederick Gillett of Massachusetts, also had the top job for less than five years.

Texas Reps. Jodey Arrington, Pete Sessions and Roger Williams are making moves to become U.S. House speaker - The Texas Tribune

Texas Reps. Jodey Arrington, Pete Sessions and Roger Williams are making moves to become U.S. House speaker.

Posted: Fri, 20 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

They spread lies that helped ignite a mob of Trump supporters to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. While it was long before the dawn of Twitter, super PACs and C-SPAN, things really haven’t changed all that much in Congress. WASHINGTON — The House was in an uproar, unable to settle on its new speaker, forcing roll call vote after roll call vote.

It came after the Republican speaker, Mike Johnson, forced a series of bills onto the floor in the face of fierce resistance within his own Republican party, many of whom oppose spending more on Ukraine’s defense. Gaetz and seven other Republicans, representing less than 2% of the country, were enough to oust McCarthy against the wishes of 95% of the Republican caucus, with Democrats uniformly hewing to the bipartisan tradition of refusing to support a speaker of the opposite party. In other words, the Republican firebrands, who think the worst sin imaginable is to work with Democrats, voted with Democrats to oust their leader.

The hearing led to a bipartisan call on Capitol Hill to denounce or demand the resignation of leaders at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for their responses, which were deemed out of touch. House Republicans have been pummeling the heads of elite university institutions for months, using them as a punching bag to make a broader point about how out-of-touch elite institutions are with normal Americans. Johnson has previously invited Jewish students to meet with him in the Capitol, and he has often allowed them to tell their stories of being under attack at school during news conferences. “If you are a protester on this campus, and you are proud that you’ve been endorsed by Hamas, you are part of the problem,” fellow N.Y. McCarthy’s ouster from a job he long coveted was induced by far-right Republicans with the support of vengeance-minded Democrats. “He wants to hold to account those who pushed him out,” said a Central Valley political operative, who has a decades-long relationship with McCarthy.

McCarthy drew false equivalence between the griping of sour-grape Democrats who lost elections and the pernicious legal and tactical fights Trump and his allies waged to overturn Biden’s victory. The reference was to allegations that Gaetz paid for sex, including relations with an underage girl, while in Congress. The Justice Department investigated the Florida lawmaker and decided not to bring charges.

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