Closing summary
After days of dysfunction and bickering that culminated in rightwing lawmaker Jim Jordan abandoning his bid to become speaker of the House despite winning the GOP’s nomination for the post, the party is again gearing up to elect a new leader in Congress’s lower chamber. This time, Republicans have nine candidates to sort through, and we’ll get an indication of who they are leaning towards this evening, when the party holds a forum for the aspirants.
Here’s a rundown of what we learned today about the race:
Tom Emmer, who is considered a frontrunner for the post, reportedly spoke over the weekend with Donald Trump. The former president’s advisers have criticized the Minnesota lawmaker as not sufficiently loyal, which could pose a problem to his bid for speaker. Fellow candidates Kevin Hern and Pete Sessions also said they got on the phone with Trump.
Trump seemed to indicate he thought only Jesus Christ could win enough votes to become speaker of the House.
Hern, who leads the large and influential Republican Study Committee, delivered his pitch to become speaker along with McDonald’s hamburgers.
The rightwing House Freedom Caucus said lawmakers should not leave Washington DC until a new speaker is appointed. Some of their members were behind the effort to oust Kevin McCarthy from the speaker’s chair.
Menendez pleads not guilty to charge related to acting as agent of Egypt
Bob Menendez, the Democratic senator who last month was indicted for accepting bribes in return for political favors, has pleaded not guilty to a new charge of acting as an unregistered agent of the Egyptian government, the Associated Press reports.
Menendez made the plea during a New York City court appearance, after which he departed without answering shouted questions:
Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) doesn’t speak to the news media as he leaves a Manhattan courthouse after pleading not guilty to a new charge of conspiring to act as a foreign agent to Egypt. pic.twitter.com/XDO1FsSKxx
— The Recount (@therecount) October 23, 2023
Here’s more on the latest charges:
More Republican House speaker aspirants say they’ve spoken to Donald Trump ahead of this evening’s candidate forum.
This includes the chair of the influential Republican Study Committee Kevin Hern, CNN reports:
HERN spoke with TRUMP but doesn’t think he will endorse in this race he tells @mkraju
— Haley Talbot (@haleytalbotcnn) October 23, 2023
As well as Texas lawmaker Pete Sessions, who voted for objecting to Arizona and Pennsylvania’s results in the 2020 election:
GOP Rep. Pete Sessions, who is running for speaker, told me Trump called him about his bid. “He called me and we had a polite conversation. I believe that the president is interested in having somebody he can work with, and I think I'm one of those people.”
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) October 23, 2023
“He and I wanted to have a clear understanding about why I'm running and what I intend to do. If he is the nominee, I think he thinks he can work with me.”
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) October 23, 2023
Asked Sessions if he regretted his vote against certifying 2020 election: “Absolutely not.”
Donald Trump has been campaigning in New Hampshire today, where he was asked about the race for speaker of the House.
It’s a little unclear, but appears to say that only Jesus Christ could manage to win election in the fractured chamber. See his comments for yourself:
"There's only one person that can do it all the way. You know who that is? Jesus Christ. If Jesus came down and said, 'I want to be Speaker,' he would do it. Other than that, I haven't seen anybody that can guarantee it."
— The Recount (@therecount) October 23, 2023
— Donald Trump, when asked about the House Speaker race pic.twitter.com/blISJz8P3H
Progressive senator Bernie Sanders has come out against the Biden administration’s request for a funding package aimed at providing Ukraine and Israel with military assistance:
Congress cannot approve BILLIONS in a supplemental budget that ONLY addresses critical emergencies around the world. We have crises here at home too — child care, health care, housing, opioid addiction — that need major funding NOW and must be included in the supplemental.
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) October 23, 2023
Sanders is an independent who caucuses with the chamber’s Democratic majority, and it’s unclear what impact his opposition will have on the fate of the package. The Senate’s top Republican Mitch McConnell said he was partial to the request, meaning it may receive bipartisan support in that chamber.
Its prospects in the House are less clear. Besides the fact that the chamber has no speaker and cannot pass legislation, a growing number of Republicans there have said they do not support further aid to Ukraine.
Oklahoma congressman Kevin Hern just said in the corridors of the House that he hopes the Republican conference will be able to pick a nominee that they can coalesce around for speaker tomorrow night.
The House is far into record breaking territory on its 20th day without a speaker while Congress is in session.
Hern told CNN that he favors a roll call vote of GOP-ers behind closed doors – in hopes of having a nominee that the conference can unite behind sufficiently to have that person elected as speaker after the decision goes to a vote of the full House floor.
The Biden administration wants to see safe passage for people out of Gaza ahead of a potential ground invasion by Israel, particularly for US citizens, White House national security spokesman John Kirby said moments ago at the regular briefing in the west wing, Reuters reports.
We still want to see safe passage out and particularly for the several hundred American citizens that we know are in Gaza and want to leave,” Kirby said.
Kirby said the US agrees with the Israeli government that “the top priority has to be going after Hamas.”
There is no daylight there,” between Israel’s and the US position, Kirby said.
We are on Israel’s side, here.”
Kirby said that the US has sent some military advisers to Israel to advise the Israelis.
Our global blog on the Israel-Gaza crisis can be read here.
The White House is keeping information very tight on what it’s doing to try to speed the release of hostages held by Hamas in Gaza. Pressure has intensified on Israel to negotiate the release of more than 200 people, including chiefly Israelis but also some Americans and other foreigners, taken by Palestinian militants after the Hamas attacks on southern Israel on October 7.
Meanwhile, Kirby said it would “certainly be helpful" if House Republicans could produce a speaker for the chamber. This a day after Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell said he endorsed Joe Biden’s $106bn aid proposal to Israel and Ukraine, which won’t get anywhere while the House is paralyzed.
The day so far
After days of dysfunction and bickering that culminated in rightwing lawmaker Jim Jordan abandoning his bid to become speaker of the House despite having the GOP’s nomination for the post, the party is again gearing up to elect a new leader in Congress’s lower chamber. This time, Republicans have nine candidates to sort through, and we’ll get an indication of who they are leaning towards this evening, when the party holds a forum for the aspirants.
Here’s a rundown of what we’ve learned today about the race:
Tom Emmer, who is considered a frontrunner for the post, reportedly spoke over the weekend with Donald Trump. The former president’s advisers have criticized the Minnesota lawmaker as not sufficiently loyal, which could pose a problem to his bid for speaker.
Kevin Hern, who leads the large and influential Republican Study Committee, delivered his pitch to become speaker along with McDonald’s hamburgers.
The rightwing House Freedom Caucus said lawmakers should not leave Washington DC until a new speaker is appointed. Some of their members were behind the effort to oust Kevin McCarthy from the speaker’s chair.
House speaker hopeful Tom Emmer spoke with Trump to ease tensions - reports
Tom Emmer, the Minnesota Republican who is seen as a frontrunner in the race for speaker of the House, spoke with Donald Trump over the weekend, Punchbowl News reports:
TRUMP and EMMER spoke Saturday, per three sources. Much more info in @PunchbowlNews midday
— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) October 23, 2023
w @bresreports
As the party’s whip, Emmer is the third-highest-ranking Republican in the House, but Politico reports that since announcing his candidacy, he’s been attacked as disloyal to Donald Trump – even though he repeatedly voted for Jim Jordan, the failed speaker candidate who won the former president’s endorsement for the job.
Former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon referred to Emmer as a “Trump Hater,” while Boris Epshteyn, a current aide to the former president, attacked him for not endorsing his presidential campaign.
“If somebody is so out of step with where the Republican electorate is, where the MAGA movement is, how can they even be in the conversation?”, Epshteyn said.
Updated
Ronny Jackson, a former White House physician to Barack Obama and Donald Trump who is now a Republican congressman, endorsed Byron Donald’s candidacy for speaker.
Here’s the Texas lawmaker’s announcement:
My full statement on the House Speaker vote: pic.twitter.com/77qQqgX26K
— Ronny Jackson (@RepRonnyJackson) October 23, 2023
Speaker candidate Kevin Hern is the chair of the Republican Study Committee, the largest ideological caucus in the House, which is geared towards advancing conservative policy goals.
Below is the “Dear Colleague” letter he sent out to announce his candidacy for the chamber’s top job. The Oklahoman is also a former McDonald’s franchise owner, and sent the letter to Republican lawmakers along with the chain’s signature burgers:
> @repkevinhern is handing out this letter to members along with McDonalds burgers.
— Reese Gorman (@reesejgorman) October 23, 2023
“We need a Speaker who will listen more than they talk. That's why over the past week, I have called, texted, or met in person with every single Member of the Republican Conference.” pic.twitter.com/uwVgtiapbm
While the Senate’s top Republican Mitch McConnell is partial to Joe Biden’s request for a joint Ukraine-Israel aid package, speaker candidate Dan Meuser told CNN he opposes it.
He’s just one man, and faces a crowded field of eight others to win the gavel, but is unlikely to be alone in his views. Here’s what he had to say:
Dan Meuser, speaker candidate, says "absolutely not" over calls by Biden and McConnell to link aid to Ukraine to Israel.
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) October 23, 2023
"Absolutely not. I think it's wrong. We need to make bills simpler." Also says a short-term CR is "going to be very difficult" and wants annual spending bills pic.twitter.com/u0oZgjhbss
There are three members of the Freedom Caucus in the race for House speaker: Gary Palmer, Mike Johnson and Byron Donalds, a Donald Trump ally who would make history as the first Black speaker.
But winning the gavel will require the back of at least some of the moderate Republicans who turned their backs on the similarly conservative Jim Jordan last week, and there’s no saying if Donalds would be successful.
In an interview with rightwing network Newsmax this weekend, Donalds tried to cast himself as a uniter of the party’s various wings. Here’s what he had to say:
I'm a member of the House Freedom Caucus, but I’ve also worked very closely with the moderate members of the Main Street Caucus.
— Congressman Byron Donalds (@RepDonaldsPress) October 22, 2023
We have worked well together & we have built a relationship of trust.
They know where I stand & they trust me that when I say something, I mean it. pic.twitter.com/AwvohY1d9L
Rightwing House Freedom Caucus demands lawmakers stay in Washington DC until speaker elected
No one leaves Washington DC until we get a speaker.
That’s what the rightwing House Freedom Caucus is telling their fellow Republicans ahead of this evening’s forum, where the nine candidates will make their cases for why they should get the chamber’s top job. Here’s the HFC’s letter:
House Republicans should not leave Washington again until we have a new Speaker of the House.
— House Freedom Caucus (@freedomcaucus) October 23, 2023
No more delays or breaks. The American People are depending on us.#NoSpeakerNoRecess pic.twitter.com/eVVNmjfMSr
Several Freedom Caucus members were among those who voted to remove Kevin McCarthy, while others supported Jim Jordan’s aborted quest to replace him.
On the topic of Donald Trump’s campaign to overturn the 2020 election, the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports that his defense against federal charges related to trying to stop Joe Biden from entering the White House may have just taken a hit from a co-defendant’s guilty plea in a separate case in Georgia:
Donald Trump’s chances of being convicted in the federal 2020 election subversion case may have increased after his top election lawyer took a plea deal in the 2020 election case in Fulton county and admitted to a felony that the effort to create fake slates of electors was fraudulent.
The immediate consequence of Kenneth Chesebro’s plea deal is that he could incriminate the former president in Georgia, given one of his plea conditions involved testifying truthfully against other defendants.
But Chesebro could also separately incriminate Trump in the federal criminal case in Washington, should the special counsel Jack Smith use his new admission as evidence that Trump conspired to defraud the United States in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
From Punchbowl News, here is a graph that looks at how the nine Republican candidates for speaker voted on some of the biggest questions that recently came before the chamber.
These include certifying the 2020 election, last year’s Respect for Marriage Act, which protects same-sex marriage rights, and aid for Ukraine. There are a few takeaways from this chart, but one of the biggest ones is that all but two of the speaker candidates supported Donald Trump’s baseless fraud claims about the 2020 election:
Here's how all the speaker candidates voted on key votes over the last few years.
— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) October 23, 2023
from @PunchbowlNews AMhttps://t.co/ec4I0rQQnJ pic.twitter.com/MRyITTJnWz
Shifting back to the chaos in the House of Representatives, remember that the man in the middle of all this is Patrick McHenry.
He’s the current speaker pro tempore, an acting position that McHenry has said he has no interest in advancing from. But with the GOP conference deeply divided over who to elect speaker, some lawmakers have openly proposed giving him the position’s full powers.
That idea may get more traction in the days to come, if none of the nine declared candidates for the post attract majority support. From Friday, here’s McHenry elaborating on the party’s schedule for this week:
Acting Speaker Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC) says House Republicans will return on Monday for a Speaker candidate forum, then will have an “election process” Tuesday morning:
— The Recount (@therecount) October 20, 2023
“The reason why I made that decision is, we need space and time for candidates to talk to other members.” pic.twitter.com/mFNOibDFjH
Speaking of Israel, it has yet to begin its threatened ground invasion of Gaza, while the enclave’s health ministry says more than 5,000 people have been killed in airstrikes since 7 October.
We have a live blog covering the latest on this story, and you can find it here:
You don’t hear too much about the Senate these days, probably because it’s been quietly doing the little that it can while the House muddles through a historic bout of dysfunction. But there was some important news out of Congress’s upper chamber over the weekend, when its top Republican Mitch McConnell signaled he was OK with Joe Biden’s request for a joint Israel-Ukraine aid package. The measure could still be blocked in the House, but it was nonetheless a positive development for the White House’s foreign policy push. Here’s the Guardian’s Sam Levine with more:
Mitch McConnell offered a strong endorsement on Sunday of the Joe Biden White House’s $106bn aid proposal to Israel and Ukraine, saying he and the president were essentially “in the same place” on the issue.
McConnell, the powerful Republican leader in the Senate, also rebuffed some of his GOP colleagues in the Senate who have called for a package separating assistance for the two countries, saying it would be “a mistake” during an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation.
The Republican leader offered significant backing to the White House’s $106bn request, including $14bn in assistance to Israel, $60bn in aid to Ukraine and another $14bn to improve security on the US Mexico border. An additional $10bn would be allocated to humanitarian relief as well as an additional $7bn to the Indio-Pacific region.
Nine Republican senators wrote a letter to McConnell on Thursday saying that Ukraine and Israel aid should not be paired together. “These are two separate conflicts and it would be wrong to leverage support of aid to Israel in an attempt to get additional aid for Ukraine across the finish line,” the group wrote.
McConnell rejected that view on Sunday.
Here’s the Guardian’s Sam Levine with a rundown of what we know about the nine Republicans who have announced their candidacy in the perilous race for House speaker:
After more than two weeks of failing to choose a speaker, Republicans in the US House plan to reconvene on Monday to begin the process of nominating a third candidate to try to get the 217 votes needed to secure the speakership.
So far, Steve Scalise, the No 2 Republican in the House, and Jim Jordan, the far-right congressman, have both failed in their bids.
Here’s a look at the nine candidates who signed up to run ahead of a noon deadline Sunday.
The nine House Republicans who want to be speaker
The race for speaker of the House is officially crowded, with nine Republicans vying for the post leading Congress’s lower chamber. Some announced immediately after Jim Jordan’s withdrawal on Friday, while others made their intentions known over the weekend. Here are the candidates:
Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the GOP whip and third-highest-ranking Republican
Mike Johnson of Louisiana, vice-chair of the Republican conference
Kevin Hern of Oklahoma, the chair of the Republican study committee, which is the largest ideological caucus in the House
Byron Donalds of Florida, a Donald Trump ally
Austin Scott of Georgia, who stood as a protest candidate against Jordan’s campaign for speaker
Jack Bergman of Michigan
Pete Sessions of Texas
Gary Palmer of Alabama
Dan Meuser of Pennsylvania
The winning candidate must receive 217 votes, or near unanimity, from the deeply fractured Republican conference. There’s no telling if any of these nine can reach that threshold.
Updated
House paralysis enters week three as nine Republicans emerge to fight for speaker
It has now been 20 days since the House of Representatives last had a speaker, and the Republican majority is no closer to figuring out who should lead Congress’s lower chamber than they were when Kevin McCarthy was booted out of the job by the far-right and Democrats. On Friday, conservative firebrand Jim Jordan’s candidacy collapsed after failing to win the speaker’s gavel in three rounds of voting, and we now have nine, yes nine, Republicans running for speaker.
We will run through all the candidates later, but Minnesota’s Tom Emmer is viewed as the frontrunner at this point. He’s the Republican whip, the third-highest-ranking position among the House GOP, and has received McCarthy’s endorsement. But if there’s one thing Republicans have proven over the past three weeks, it’s that they are not afraid of shutting down their own lawmakers, no matter how prominent, and Emmer could be as summarily rejected as McCarthy and Jordan were. We’ll get signs of how things are going this evening at 6.30pm eastern time, when the GOP holds a forum for their candidates. The first votes on a new speaker as supposed to follow tomorrow.
Here’s what else is going on today:
Joe Biden is stumping for his economic successes with a speech on “Bidenomics” at 2.15pm. Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will take reporters’ questions at 1pm.
Mitch McConnell, the top Senate Republican, came out in favor of a Biden administration request for $106bn in aid for Ukraine and Israel as well as border security funds. But Congress cannot pass anything without a speaker of the House.
Andy Beshear is the unlikely Democratic governor of red state Kentucky, and is fighting for another term in office. He’ll debate his Republican opponent Daniel Cameron at 8pm.
Updated
