Jim Jordan lost a secret ballot held by House Republicans which removes him as speaker designate, said the Republican Florida representative Kat Cammack.
Steve Scalise of Louisiana said that Republicans will start over on Monday.
Punchbowl News’s Jake Sherman reports that the vote margin was large, according to sources familiar with the vote.
The Supreme Court on Friday kept a Missouri law on hold that bars police from enforcing federal gun laws, rejecting an emergency appeal from the state.
The Associated Press reports:
The 2019 law was ruled unconstitutional by a district judge but allowed to remain in effect. A federal appeals court then blocked enforcement while the state appeals the district court ruling.
Missouri had wanted the law to be in effect while the court fight plays out.
Justice Clarence Thomas was the only member of the court to side with Missouri on Friday.
The law would impose a fine of $50,000 on an officer who knowingly enforces federal gun laws that don’t match up with state restrictions.
Federal laws without similar Missouri laws include registration and tracking requirements and possession of firearms by some domestic violence offenders.
The court expanded gun rights in a 2022 decision authored by Thomas. It is hearing arguments next month in the first case stemming from last year’s ruling. An appeals court invalidated a federal law that aims to keep guns away from people facing domestic violence restraining orders.
Long-shot Republican presidential candidate Perry Johnson has announced his decision to suspend his presidential campaign.
On Friday, the Michigan businessman released a statement, saying, “With no oppurtunity to share my vision on the debate stage, I have decided at this time, suspending my campaign is the right thing to do.”
Johnson criticized the Republican National Committee and its “corrupt leaders” with “authoritarian powers.”
“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the people should decide the next president of the United States, not the head of the RNC and her cronies,” he added.
Johnson said that he is only suspending his campaign, rather than withdrawing entirely and plans to keep a small political team on staff “in the event the dynamics of the race change.”
Tennessee’s Republican representative Mark Green is not runnning for speaker, Green’s office told Punchbowl News.
With Jim Jordan out of the speaker race, here is an explainer by the Guardian’s Sam Levine on why he lost and what happens next:
Why did Republicans oppose Jordan?
Several of the members who are opposed to Jordan are members of the House appropriations committee, who are reportedly opposed to the way Jordan has embraced a hard line on spending cuts and shutting down the government.
There is also reportedly bad blood over the way Jordan and his allies treated Steve Scalise. Scalise previously beat Jordan to win the conference’s nomination to be speaker, but withdrew his bid after it became clear he couldn’t get enough votes to win in the House. Some Scalise allies think Jordan didn’t do enough to rally Republicans around Scalise.
What happens next?
No one knows. Even as it was clear that Jordan had no clear path to becoming the speaker, no Republican emerged to seriously challenge him. Republicans currently have a Sunday noon deadline to announce their candidacy ahead of another round of speakership talks.
For the full explainer, click here:
Mike Pence has called on House Republicans to “decide what team you want to be on” as Republicans revert back to square one following their inability to decide on a speaker.
Speaking on SiriusXM, the presidential candidate said:
“Never in my wildest dreams would I have ever imagined eight Republicans partnering with every Democrat in Congress to throw out a Republican speaker of the House. All roads lead back to the eight members of what I call the chaos caucus who set all this into motion.”
“With everything that’s happening in the world … the American people are looking to Republicans in the Congress to stop fighting with each other and start fighting for them.”
House Republicans have set Sunday 12pm as the deadline to file as a speaker candidate.
A candidate forum for the speaker will be held on Monday at 6.30pm and a secret ballot leadership election will be held on Tuesday at 9am.
It remains unclear when a floor vote for speaker will be.
Texas’s Republican representative Chip Roy said that it was a “mistake for the Republican conference to just walk away from arguably the most popular Republican in the Republican party.”
Speaking to CNN’s Manu Raju, Roy said, “We shouldn’t have done that,” adding, “I think having the American people be able to see how we are wrestling with the tough decisions and what we’re trying to do, and doing it with intensity and doing it because we care about this country.”
Former speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy is throwing his weight behind GOP whip Tom Emmer’s bid to replace him, Punchbowl News reports:
It’s a boost for Emmer, but not necessarily a decisive one. McCarthy also supported Jim Jordan, and look how that turned out. Meanwhile, Punchbowl reports that Emmer is among a fairly sizable group of Republicans running for the House speaker post, or considering it:
They’ll be having a busy weekend.
The judge overseeing Donald Trump and his family members’ civil fraud trial in New York City fined the former president $5,000 for a post he determined violated a gag order, but did not order him to jail – yet.
Here’s more on that, from the Associated Press:
Judge Arthur Engoron avoided holding Trump in contempt, for now, but reserved the right to do so – and possibly even put him in jail – if he continued to violate a gag order barring parties in the case from personal attacks on court staff.
Engoron said in a written ruling that he is “way beyond the ‘warning’ stage” but decided on a nominal fine because Trump’s lawyers said the website’s retention of the post was inadvertent and was a “first-time violation”.
Earlier, an incensed Engoron said the failure to delete the post from the website was a “blatant violation” of his 3 October order, which required Trump to delete the offending message.
Trump lawyer Christopher Kise blamed the “very large machine” of Trump’s presidential campaign for allowing his deleted social media post to remain on his website, calling it an unintentional oversight.
Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, wasn’t in court Friday. He’d returned to the trial Tuesday and Wednesday after attending the first three days in early October, but skipped the rest of the week.
Speaking of people who are running for office, Donald Trump has made it clear he won’t be at the third Republican primary debate in Miami on 8 November.
But he will be in the city in his role as spoiler, hosting an open-air rally at the same time that his rivals for the party’s presidential nomination are taking the stage.
Trump’s campaign announced Friday that the former president would be appearing at Ted Hendricks stadium in Hialeah, 10 miles from the Adrienne Arsht performing arts center in Miami where the Republican National Committee debate will take place.
The former president is the runaway leader for the nomination, despite his worsening legal problems. He skipped the first debate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in August, and last month’s second event in Simi Valley, California, although he still emerged as the most-talked-about candidate despite his absence.
Trump has called for the RNC to cancel the Miami debate, arguing that he’s so far ahead of his challengers as to make it meaningless, and that a failure to do so would be an admission that “national Republicans are more concerned about helping Joe Biden”.
Tom Emmer, a Minnesota congressman who is the third-highest-ranking Republican in the House, will run for speaker, Punchbowl News reports:
Before Kevin McCarthy’s removal from the speaker’s post, the Washington Post reported that conservative hardliners were in favor of nominating him for the chamber’s top job.
Jim Jordan started out the day by hinting that the House would have to stick around through the weekend to vote on his candidacy for speaker.
Hours later, the GOP stripped him of the party’s nomination in a closed-door meeting. No more weekend votes for them.
As CNN reports, the next phase of the speaker’s race will play out starting Monday with a candidates’ forum, but you can bet that Kevin Hern and other Republicans who throw their hat into the ring will spend this weekend campaigning within the party:
Republican majority leader Steve Scalise, who was briefly the party’s nominee for speaker before withdrawing when he concluded he would not win majority support, will not run for the post again, Punchbowl News reports:
Oklahoma’s Republican representative Kevin Hern has announced he will run for House speaker.
Hern, the chair of the Republican study committee (the House’s largest caucus among Republicans), said:
I just voted for my good friend Jim Jordan to stay as our speaker designate, but the conference has determined that he will no longer hold that title. We just had two speaker designates go down. We must unify and do it fast.
I’ve spoken to every member of the conference over the last few weeks. We need a different type of leader who has a proven track record of success, which is why I’m running for speaker of the House.
Following the secret GOP ballot, Jim Jordan said on live TV, “I’m going to go back to work.”
In reference to who the next speaker would be, Jordan said, “Let’s work out who that individual is,” and added, “It’s time to unite.”
White House spokesperson Andrew Bates has commented on the latest House speaker vote, urging House Republicans to “end their chaotic infighting and their competitions to out-extreme one another.”
“While Joe Biden fights to advance bipartisan legislation that will protect our national security interests – including in Israel and Ukraine – provide humanitarian assistance for innocent civilians in Gaza, deliver critical border funding, compete with China, and grow our economy, House Republicans are somehow still fighting with each other,” said Bates.
He went on to call upon House Republicans to “join President Biden in working on urgent priorities for American families shared by both parties in Congress.”
The former House speaker Kevin McCarthy said that Republicans will now “have to go back to the drawing board”.
“I’m concerned where we go from here,” added McCarthy.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
