1 year ago
35
We begin today with Luke Broadwater of The New York Times reporting that Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan’s pressure campaign to persuade Republicans to elect him Speaker of the House is working but, as of last night, there were still too many holdouts.
Several mainstream Republicans who had said they could not countenance a vote for Mr. Jordan, the hard-line co-founder of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, fell into line after a pressure campaign by his right-wing allies and a series of one-on-one calls with him.
Their reversals suggested that Mr. Jordan was within striking distance of the 217 votes he would need to be elected in a planned vote around noon on Tuesday. But the outcome remained far from certain.
“The role of the speaker is to bring all Republicans together. That’s what I intend to do,” Mr. Jordan said in a letter sent to his Republican colleagues on Monday. In it, Mr. Jordan acknowledged the deep divisions in the G.O.P. and said he would give more lawmakers input into the party’s agenda. [...]
People close to Mr. Jordan, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said the number of Republican holdouts had shrunk from around 50 to around 10. That is still enough to block his election, but he planned to press ahead anyway, counting on his remaining opposition to cave under pressure on the House floor.
