Mike Johnson steps aside. Will House Republicans pick his deputy over Jim Jordan?
Mike Johnson will not lead Republicans in the US House after their election defeat. On 10 November they choose Steve Scalise or Jim Jordan.
What happened
Speaker Mike Johnson will not run for minority leader after Republicans lost the House. Steve Scalise and Jim Jordan asked colleagues for the job, and the vote is on Tuesday .
Mike Johnson will not lead House Republicans in the new Congress. Johnson, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, told his staff on , the day after Democrats won control of the House in the midterm elections. Republicans in the House will pick their new leader in a vote of their own. From January the winner leads the smaller party in the House, a post called minority leader.
Republicans in the chamber plan to hold their leadership elections on Tuesday, Nov. 10, one week after Election Day.
CBS News,
Only two men are running: Steve Scalise and Jim Jordan. Scalise is the majority leader, the number two Republican in the House, and a close ally of Johnson. Jordan chairs the Judiciary Committee, which oversees the courts and the Justice Department. He was the first chairman of the Freedom Caucus, a group of about 30 hard-right Republicans. Members had until Friday to enter the race.
Both men have written to their colleagues. Scalise wrote that his “number one goal as Republican Leader will be to win back the majority”. Jordan wrote that he is “battle-tested on the oversight front”, meaning ready to face the Democrats’ coming investigations of President Donald Trump’s government. Asked about the race, Trump said “We’ll stay out of it”. On the same day Republicans also choose their whip, the leader who counts votes, and August Pfluger is running against Tom Emmer.
Sources: CBS News, NBC News, NPR, The Washington Post, Politico
The Pattern
We looked for cases where a party leader in the US House stepped away and the party’s members chose a new one, with the next most senior leader facing a rival linked to one wing of the party. We found five such races since 1971, four of them among Republicans. The next most senior leader won four of them.
Show the other 3 cases
The Read
Four times in five, the party chose its next most senior leader. In the two races most like this one, after Republicans had just lost the House, the rival from the right got 27 votes in 2006, about one in seven, and Jim Jordan himself got 43 in 2018, about one in five. Both were two-man races settled in one round, as this one will be.
There are reasons for doubt. In the same two men faced a secret vote of House Republicans, and Scalise won only 113 to 99. Most Republicans who lost their seats on came from the moderate wing, where many of Scalise’s closest allies sit, and the Freedom Caucus chairman Andy Harris backs Jordan. In the next most senior leader led the first round and still lost.
Sources: NBC News (2, 3), The Guardian, The Washington Post
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