The Republican congressman Steve Scalise is ending his bid to become the US House speaker after failing to secure enough votes to win the gavel.
“I just shared with my colleagues that I’m withdrawing my name as a candidate for speaker-designee,” Scalise said as he emerged from the closed-door meeting at the Capitol, where he first informed fellow Republican colleagues of his decision.
Scalise, a hardline conservative representing Louisiana, said the Republican majority “still has to come together and is not there”.
“There are still some people that have their own agendas,” Scalise said. “And I was very clear, we have to have everybody put their agendas on the side and focus on what this country needs.”
Next steps are uncertain as the House is now essentially closed, while the Republican majority tries to elect a speaker after a small number of them voted alongside Democrats to oust Kevin McCarthy from the job.
The standoff over the speakership, which was sparked by the hard-right Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, has left congressional business at a standstill, with many Republican lawmakers furious at the degree of division within their party – and how voters are likely to judge them for their inability to govern.
Scalise’s decision to end his bid followed a day of meetings that moved him no closer to overcoming the entrenched divisions imperiling his quest for the speakership.
Scalise, who survived being wounded during the 2017 mass shooting targeting a Republican congressional baseball practice, made clear that the experience only deepened his commitment to protecting gun rights.
He has been rising in Republican leadership ranks over the past decade, and was elected the House majority leader last year. Scalise has long been defended by his party despite reports that he compared himself to Louisiana Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke early in his career, describing himself as “David Duke without the baggage”, and that he attended a white supremacist conference organized by Duke in 2002.
Scalise has said that attending the conference “was a mistake I regret”, and that he “emphatically oppose[d] the divisive racial and religious views that groups like these hold”.
House Republicans had raised a number of concerns with Scalise’s candidacy, among them that, as the No 2 House Republican, he doesn’t represent institutional change, that he lacks a unifying vision for the conference, or that his battle with blood cancer would make it difficult for him to lead the chamber.
Supporters of the congressman Jim Jordan of Ohio, the chair of the judiciary committee, said they would continue to push for his candidacy as speaker and called for other party members to rally around Jordan, who is a founding leader of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus.
“Make him the speaker. Do it tonight,” Jim Banks, an Indiana Republican, said. “He’s the only one who can unite our party. It’s time to get behind him.”
Other potential speaker nominees were being floated, including from the leadership team, but splitting the votes multiple ways would almost certainly only complicate the factional dynamics in the House majority.
Asked if he would now throw his support behind Jordan, Scalise said: “It’s got to be people that aren’t doing it for themselves and their own personal interest.”
McCarthy himself said today that Scalise would remain as majority leader, but had no other advice for his colleagues.
“I just think the conference as a whole has to figure out their problems, solve it and select the leader,” he said.
Many hardliners taking their cues from Donald Trump have dug in for a prolonged fight to replace McCarthy after his historic ouster from the job, saying Scalise is not the replacement they will support. They argued that he is no better choice than McCarthy and should be focusing on his health.
Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, had previously endorsed Jordan, and repeatedly discussed Scalise’s health during a radio interview that aired Thursday.
“Well, I like Steve. I like both of them very much. But the problem, you know, Steve is a man that is in serious trouble, from the standpoint of his cancer,” Trump said on Fox News host Brian Kilmeade’s radio show.
“I think it’s going to be very hard, maybe in either case, for somebody to get,” Trump said. “And then you end up in one of these crazy stalemates. It’s a very interesting situation.”
Earlier on Thursday, Troy Nehls, a Republican congressman from Texas, had reaffirmed his support for Trump himself as speaker; the position does not need to go to a member of Congress.
Scalise’s Thursday night announcement sent Republicans back to the drawing board, and some Republican members of Congress immediately started sparring on social media. When Florida congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna tweeted out a list of potential candidates, after making headlines for changing her support for Scalise overnight, Georgia congressman Mike Collins responded: “We already did that,” and wrote that the real problem was that “it’s egos and TV time”.
“We’re a ship without a rudder right now,” the freshman Missouri congressman Mark Alford told reporters Thursday night. “And I’m thoroughly disappointed in the process. And I just pray to God that we find something.”
The House is entering its second week without a speaker and is essentially unable to function. The political pressure increasingly is on Republicans to reverse course, reassert majority control and govern.
Action is needed to fund the government before a potential federal shutdown in a month. Lawmakers also want Congress to deliver a strong statement of support for Israel in the war with Hamas, but a bipartisan resolution has been sidelined by the stalemate in the House. The White House is expected to soon ask for money for Israel, Ukraine and the backfill of the US weapons stockpile.
The situation is not entirely different from that of the start of the year, when McCarthy faced a similar backlash from a different group of far-right holdouts who ultimately gave their votes to elect him speaker, then engineered his historic downfall.
Exasperated Democrats, who have been watching and waiting for the Republican majority to recover from McCarthy’s ouster, urged them to figure it out, warning the world is watching.
“The House Republicans need to end the GOP civil war, now,” the New York congressman Hakeem Jeffries said.
Lauren Gambino, Joan E Greve and Martin Pengelly contributed reporting
