On Thursday morning, House Republican leaders had hoped they’d finally found a way out of their bitter speaker’s race standoff. The idea was, they’d punt the contest until January, when Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) would again try to win over Republican holdouts. In the meantime, they’d empower the guy currently sitting in the speaker chair on a temporary basis, Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC).
Jordan himself had agreed to the plan. But when it was presented at the Republican conference, many rank-and-file members recoiled from it. The right was furious, viewing the proposal as an attempt to undercut them and deal with Democrats. So by the afternoon, the McHenry proposal appeared to be dead, and Jordan said he’d keep trying to win the speaker’s race now — placing us back where we started at the beginning of the week.
Republicans’ staring contest of a speaker’s race, then, is continuing, with no resolution in sight. Here’s the GOP’s math problem:
- 217 out of 221 Republicans need to vote for the GOP’s speaker candidate on the House floor to elect him (if all Democrats oppose him).
- Roughly 180 Republicans appear to be team players who will happily back any nominee preferred by most of the conference.
- But there are about 20 holdouts on the right who have embraced hardball tactics to try and force a more right-wing speaker to be elected. Think of them as an “Only Jordan” bloc.
- And now there’s a newly emerged roughly 20-person “Never Jordan” bloc, composed of mostly mainstream or swing-district members who are fighting back against the right-wingers.
So what are the ways this could end?
1) The “Never Jordan” bloc caves: Jordan is currently the GOP’s speaker nominee, and he’s still trying to win over enough support among the 22 Republicans who opposed him on the most recent House floor vote.
Some of these members are powerful Appropriations Committee Republicans who could be given promises over how Jordan will handle spending…
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