If Rep. Ted Yoho or Rep. Louie Gohmert is going to become the next speaker of the House, one of them will need to convince as many as 28 ...
If Rep. Ted Yoho or Rep. Louie Gohmert is going to become the next speaker of the House, one of them will need to convince as many as 28 Republicans not to vote for John Boehner and support his candidacy.
That’s going to be a tall order Tuesday, when Republicans take control of the House and Senate and the 114th Congress convenes for the new term. Boehner only lost about a dozen votes before winning his second term as House speaker in 2013 and has a larger cushion this year with 246 Republicans in the majority.
Rep. Dave Brat, the Tea Party’s giant-slayer who took down then-majority leader Eric Cantor in last year’s Virginia GOP primary, became the latest Republican to say he won’t vote for Boehner.
“While I like Speaker Boehner personally, he will not have my support for speaker,” Brat wrote in an op-ed column published Monday on Breitbart.com.
This is a reversal for Brat, who supported Boehner in November when the GOP conference formally re-nominated the Ohio lawmaker for a third term as speaker. The Virginia lawmaker complained that the House GOP leadership did not allow an amendment to block President Obama’s executive order on immigration in the $1 trillion spending bill to fund most of the government through September.
Brat joins other Republicans who have publicly said they won’t support Boehner. They include Reps. Jim Bridenstine of Oklahoma, Walter Jones of North Carolina, Steve King of Iowa, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Paul Gosar of Arizona, Gary Palmer of Alabama, Marlin Stutzman of Indiana, and Yoho of Florida and Gohmert of Texas — who declared their candidacies for the House’s top job this weekend.
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