House Republicans Melt Down, Boil Over, and Spill to Reporters About It

It’s Day 16 without a House speaker, and congressional Republicans are no closer to electing someone to replace Kevin McCarthy than they were two weeks ago. Meanwhile, tensions appear to have reached a breaking point.

The GOP’s four-hour, closed-door meeting on Thursday began with a debate over extending Representative Patrick McHenry’s temporary speakership, but instead devolved into a full-blown meltdown, with party members pointing fingers at one another and somehow leaving the caucus even less unified than before.

McCarthy and Representative Matt Gaetz, one of the former speaker’s ousters, got especially heated. When Gaetz went to speak at the mic, McCarthy reportedly “screamed” at him to sit down. Representative Michael Bost then got “all emotional” and began cursing at Gaetz, huffing that the current predicament was “all his fault,” reported CNN’s Melanie Zanona.

“I think the whole country is screaming at Matt Gaetz,” McCarthy told Axios’s Juliegrace Brufke, denying allegations that he raised his voice.

One member of the House GOP turned to prayer. Another left for lunch. Still others took to a joint study session, scouring copies of the U.S. Constitution amid an unprecedented bid to expand McHenry’s power as speaker pro tempore so that he could run the House for weeks (or longer) while the party worked on electing a speaker.

But that plan—just like Representative Jim Jordan’s nomination for speaker, and Steve Scalise’s before him—lacks the necessary Republican votes to pass, which means only Democratic support could salvage it.

Jordan emerged from the GOP’s epic meeting to declare, “I’m still running for speaker, and I plan to go to the floor and get the votes.” But it’s not clear how he’ll get there.

The number of House Republicans on record opposing Jordan has grown from 20 to 22, and some of his detractors warn that the real number could be as high as 40. Which means there’s no end in sight to the GOP’s impasse.

GOP Representative Jim Banks said it best: “We don’t deserve the majority if we go along with a plan to give the Democrats control over the House of Representatives.”*

* This piece has been updated with the full quote from Banks.

After two failed floor votes, and his number of Republican supporters in decline, Representative Jim Jordan is backing down from his bid for House speaker.

The Ohio Republican announced Thursday morning that he would not be pursuing an additional floor vote, reported The Washington Post. Instead, Jordan is reversing course and backing a plan to expand the powers of Representative Patrick McHenry’s temporary speakership until January.

It’s currently unclear how many Republicans will get behind McHenry, though predictions haven’t been rosy. Ahead of a short recess, Texas Representative Pat Fallon estimated that two-thirds of the caucus will oppose the resolution, reported Punchbowl News’s John Bresnahan.

Other Republicans appeared frustrated and even betrayed by the turn of events, openly fuming to press about the McHenry plan.

“It’s absurd,” Indiana Representative Jim Banks told Fox News, noting that at least half of the Republican members in the House plan to vote against it. “It was the biggest ‘F.U.’ to Republican voters I’ve ever seen.”

“It’s going to take Democrats to make it happen. And that’s a historic betrayal to our Republican voters if we go along with it. It’s a big mistake,” Banks added.

Arizona Representative Debbie Lesko allegedly told Jordan that he should step down if he supports the McHenry resolution, snubbing Jordan’s behavior as “self-serving,” according to Politico’s Olivia Beavers.

Meanwhile, House Democrats have their own set of requirements for the fill-in.

Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Democrats want assurances that the temporary speaker will support the previously negotiated debt limit deal and consider supplemental aid to Ukraine and Israel. They also are demanding that whoever fills the seat be someone who voted to certify the 2020 presidential election results, reported Punchbowl News’s Heather Caygle.

McHenry refused to respond to any questions regarding the impending decision, reported Fox News’s Chad Pergram.

Former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell cut a deal with Fulton County prosecutors on Wednesday, pleading guilty to six misdemeanor charges in the Georgia election interference case just one day before her criminal trial was set to begin.

Powell, a prominent election fraud conspiracy theorist, was sentenced to six years probation and slapped with a $6,000 fine. She will also be required to pay $2,700 in restitution to the state of Georgia to cover the cost of replacing the violated election equipment.

As part of the deal, Powell is required to write an apology letter to the citizens of Georgia, and eventually will testify against her 17 co-defendants, including her onetime client Donald Trump.

By taking the plea deal, Powell is admitting to her role in the election-systems breach in Republican-heavy Coffee County in January 2021, where Trump supporters accessed and copied election data in hopes of subverting the presidential election results.

Powell is the second person to plead guilty in the racketeering case. Last month, Atlanta-area bail bondsman Scott Hall admitted to a special grand jury that he gained access to the voting machines. Hall has also agreed to testify at future trials.

Another co-defendant and alleged architect of the scheme, Kenneth Chesebro, allegedly rejected his plea deal, which would have given him three years’ probation and a $10,000 fine, ABC News reported. Jury selection in Chesebro’s expedited trial begins Friday.

Trial dates have not yet been set for Trump and his 16 remaining co-defendants.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has long downplayed the January 6 riot that claimed five lives, has denounced a peaceful protest on Capitol Hill as an “insurrection” and demanded that the police preserve surveillance footage of the protesters.

Hundreds of Jewish American activists—many of them members of Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist group—held a sit-in at a House of Representatives building on Wednesday to demand a cease-fire in Gaza. It was too much for Greene’s delicate sensibilities, apparently.

The Georgia congresswoman says she will ask the House to censure Michigan Representative Rashida Tlaib, who Greene says “organized” the protest. She also filed a request with the Capitol Police “to preserve all video surveillance footage, photographic evidence, police reports, and arrest records” from the House office buildings.

This is coming from the same person who has referred to the January 6 rioters as “political prisoners,” suggested they were following “what our Declaration of Independence says ... to overthrow tyrants,” and said that if she and former President Donald Trump had led the attack on the Capitol, they would have “won.”

At yesterday’s sit-in at the Cannon House Office Building, activists carried signs demanding a cease-fire and chanted, “Not in our name.” More than 500 people, including Rabbis, were arrested by Capitol Police, organizers estimated.

Tlaib spoke to a section of the protest outside the Capitol Building, calling on President Joe Biden to rethink his unequivocal support for Israel in the war.

“President Biden, not all Americans are with you on this one and you need to understand that. We are literally watching people commit genocide and killing the vast majority just like this, and we still stand by and say nothing. We will remember this,” she told the crowd.

Representative Jim Jordan’s bid for speaker of the House was always a long shot, but his allies may have doomed him.

Along with a pressure campaign orchestrated by Sean Hannity’s production team at Fox, Jordan’s camp is allegedly (and often anonymously) attempting to strong-arm his critics in hopes of reversing some two dozen holdouts against the Ohio Republican.

Tactics, which Jordan himself has disavowed, have so far included veiled threats and leveraging outright lies about political allegiances, according to several Republicans.

Jordan has so far lost two floor votes for the gavel, bleeding more votes with each run. On Tuesday, the ultraconservative lost the ballot by 20 votes. During Wednesday’s vote, he lost two more, suggesting that something behind the scenes was going haywire.

Several of Jordan’s detractors took to the press to make their grievances with the unsavory gambit known.

Representative Don Bacon told Politico that his wife had received several anonymous emails and texts warning her husband to back Jordan, reading things like, “Why is your husband causing chaos by not supporting Jim Jordan?” and claiming that Bacon was a “failure” and not a “team player.”

“Threatening us does not work,” Bacon later told Newsmax.

Representative Carlos Giménez told NBC he has been the target of robocalls over his opposition to Jordan’s candidacy.

In an interview with CBS, Giménez added that Jordan’s camp was weaponizing misinformation and “total lies” to sway opinion, including claiming that the Florida congressman would cast his vote for Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

“It doesn’t work on me. What you’ve done now is you’ve cemented my position,” Giménez said, calling the behavior “very disturbing.”

Other Republicans agreed, doubling down on their previous positions.

“The one thing that will never work with me—if you try to pressure me, if you try to threaten me, then I shut off,” Representative Mario Díaz-Balart told Politico.

“I don’t think it’s been helpful to Jim,” Representative Byron Donalds told C-SPAN, referring to Jordan’s whip operation. “Some of the stuff just is not going to move these members. As a matter of fact, it only makes them harder to convince.”

As Jordan preps for another ballot for House speaker Thursday at noon, his Republican opponents warn that he will only continue to bleed more votes, revealing to CNN’s Melanie Zanona that they have been staggering their “no” votes against Jordan to illustrate growing opposition.