Leadership

Table Of Content

• Some of the Republicans who supported 2020 election lies have led the charge against Kevin McCarthy.
• Members of the 117th Congress Sworn In
• Support our journalism
• Hakeem Jeffries officially becomes the first Black lawmaker to lead a party in Congress
• Speaker pro tempore
• Who is Mike Johnson? Five things to know about the new Republican House speaker
• Congressman Mike Johnson Elected Speaker of the House

That amendment failed, , with a majority of Republicans voting against the amendment. Rep. Pete Aguilar of California, chairman of the Democratic caucus, rose to nominate Jeffries for speaker and accused Republicans of manufacturing a crisis that has lasted 22 days. Jeffries closed his remarks declaring, "Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. He's doing a great job under difficult circumstances and no amount of election denialism will ever change that reality. Not now. Not ever." He noted that Democrats provided support for legislation to raise the debt ceiling, avoid a government shutdown and provide disaster relief funding.

Some of the Republicans who supported 2020 election lies have led the charge against Kevin McCarthy.

They enlarged the party leadership structure, creating wider networks of loyalty among members of the majority party while strengthening support for their priorities. By 1910, Speaker Joe Cannon had centralized power to such an extent that many of his own party members rebelled. Mr. McCarthy watched as the hard-right flank of that majority ran John A. Boehner of Ohio from his speakership in 2015 and blocked his own first attempt at securing the job, after 40 of its members announced that they would not support him, questioning his conservative credentials. Mr. Gaetz said on Tuesday that lawmakers should not give the post to somebody willing to sell “shares of himself to get” it. WASHINGTON — For days as hard-right lawmakers voted again and again to block him from becoming speaker, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California sat on the House floor with a grin plastered to his face. Even as some lawmakers have grumbled about the revival of earmarking, neither House nor Senate Republicans have issued a binding ban against including them in spending bills.

Members of the 117th Congress Sworn In

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene files motion to oust Mike Johnson as House speaker - NBC News

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene files motion to oust Mike Johnson as House speaker.

Posted: Fri, 22 Mar 2024 07:00:00 GMT [source]

Along with being Vermont’s first female member of Congress, Balint is also the first out LGBTQ person elected to Washington from the Green Mountain State. Garcia was officially sworn into office early Saturday morning alongside other House members. It is presently unclear when the ceremonial swearing in, at which Garcia will use the comic, will take place. President Joe Biden spoke with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to congratulate him on winning the gavel in a call Saturday afternoon, according to the White House. "We actually interacted more this week than we have in the last four years. And if anything, that relationship-building is where it was at." More details about the Members of the House of Representatives are available from the Clerk of the House.

Support our journalism

When Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana wanted to make the case against abortion rights last year during a Capitol Hill committee hearing, he grilled a witness in graphic fashion. Mr. Johnson said Mr. Jordan called him when he was running for office, because “he knew I was a conservative,” contributed money to his campaign and invited him to Washington for a meeting with him and other Freedom Caucus members. In December 2020, Mr. Johnson collected signatures for a legal brief in support of a Texas lawsuit, rooted in baseless claims of widespread election irregularities, that tried to throw out the results in four battleground states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr. We’re seeing a little bit of that here, with his gracious words toward Jeffries, promising to work together and find common ground. About a year ago, after Republicans underperformed expectations in the midterm elections, Mr. Johnson discussed how some of his allies were feeling “dejected and depressed about what’s happened.” But he spoke optimistically about Republicans regaining control of the House, and the ramifications. “This affirms the path that we took,” Representative Bob Good of Virginia, one of the eight Republicans who voted to oust former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, tells reporters.

Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, a founder of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus and someone Mr. Johnson has described as a mentor, was the next member to be elected speaker designate in a secret ballot. He had Mr. Trump and the far right in his corner, but ultimately failed to win over more centrist members of his party who steadfastly refused to support him. While Republicans are celebrating finally electing a speaker, across the Capitol, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, chimes in with a reminder of the impending mid-November government shutdown looming unless Congress can pass legislation to keep it funded. “I look forward to meeting with Speaker Johnson soon to discuss the path forward to avoid a government shutdown,” Mr. Schumer said in a statement.

Third, the speaker oversees everything from accounting to procurement for the House. It also helped Mr. McCarthy’s cause that no viable challenger, like Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, his whip, or Patrick T. McHenry of North Carolina, ever stepped forward to offer themselves as a consensus candidate who could end the deadlock. Yet that style has appeared uniquely ill-suited to the challenge Mr. McCarthy faces of corralling a restive group of ideologically driven House Republicans that is obsessed with legislative details and skilled at procedural disruption. Mr. Roy, an initial holdout against Mr. McCarthy, led negotiations to try to bring about a deal that would make Mr. McCarthy the speaker in exchange for changes to House rules. Not every Republican involved in blocking Mr. McCarthy’s ascension was among those who voted against certifying Mr. Biden’s victory. In 2021, Democrats, newly in control of Washington, agreed to overhaul and rebrand the practice, changing the name from earmarks to “community project funding,” and introducing more limits and transparency.

He once shared the story with a mostly Democratic audience at a congressional hearing on slavery reparations, and he was surprised to hear boos as he spoke, he later recounted to the Council for National Policy, an assembly of conservative donors known for its strict secrecy. Mr. Johnson was only able to emerge as his party’s nominee for speaker this week after three other G.O.P. nominees before him were unable to rally enough support. In the years before he arrived in Congress in 2017, Mr. Johnson worked as an attorney and spokesman for the anti-abortion-rights and anti-gay group Alliance Defense Fund — now called the Alliance Defending Freedom. During that time, he expressed some of his hard-line views in editorials in the local newspaper in his hometown of Shreveport, La.

The House passed a resolution in support of Israel in the war against Hamas – the first measure to come to the floor after Speaker Mike Johnson was elected earlier Wednesday following three weeks without a speaker. In 1989 Speaker Jim Wright of Texas resigned under pressure following revelations about a book deal the House Ethics Committee saw as circumventing fundraising rules. Longworth's successor, John "Cactus Jack" Garner of Texas, left the office after just over a year to be Franklin Roosevelt's first vice president. Johnson is the sixth Republican elevated to the speakership since 1994, the year the party won its first House majority and elected a speaker of its own for the first time in 40 years. The hard truth is that the five who preceded Johnson (McCarthy, Paul Ryan, John Boehner, Dennis Hastert and Newt Gingrich) all saw their time in the office end in relative degrees of defeat or frustration.

Congressman Mike Johnson Elected Speaker of the House

The House has been in a state of uncertainty and chaos since Oct. 3, when rebels forced a vote to oust Mr. McCarthy as speaker. Eight Republicans backed that move along with Democrats, who remained united behind their own leader, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York. Republicans had cast aside two previous winners of their closed-door nominating process — Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana and Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio — before settling on Mr. Emmer.

Also part of the proposal, Republicans familiar with it said, was a commitment by the leader to give the ultraconservative faction approval over a third of the seats on the powerful Rules Committee, which controls what legislation reaches the floor and how it is debated. He also agreed to open government spending bills to a freewheeling debate in which any lawmaker could force votes on proposed changes. Gingrich managed to restore many of the powers of the speakership but clashed repeatedly with Clinton and even with Republican leaders in the Senate. In 1997, in his second Congress as speaker, he barely survived a largely covert challenge from within his own leadership team. And just shy of his fourth anniversary in the job, he was voted out by the full House Republican conference in December 1998. Historically, there have been several controversial elections to the speakership, such as the contest of 1839.

After she concluded, Speaker Pelosi then swore in the rest of the lawmakers, including 59 new freshman Members. Members-elect and returning Members were sworn in during the first day of the first session of the 117th Congress. Lisa Desjardins is a correspondent for PBS NewsHour, where she covers news from the U.S.

Over a year later, on “Truth Be Told,” the Christian podcast he hosts with his wife, Kelly, Mr. Johnson continued to argue that he and his colleagues had been right to object to the election results. “You know the allegations about these voting machines, some of them being rigged with this software by Dominion, there’s a lot of merit to that,” Mr. Johnson said. Johnson says that he will bring to the floor “in just a little while” a resolution in support of Israel. “We’re going to show not only Israel but the entire world that the barbarism of Hamas" is "wretched and wrong,” he said. “While there are issues where we differ, we must get back to governing for the good of the country,” Mr. Lawler wrote on social media, posting a photo of himself and Mr. Johnson shaking hands.