Republican Kevin McCarthy has been elected as House speaker on a momentous post-midnight ballot early Saturday, January 7, 2023.
McCarthy has overcome holdouts from his own ranks and floor tensions that ensued over after a chaotic week that tested the new Republican majority’s ability to govern.
It took 15 rounds of voting for Mr McCarthy to win the job, despite his party having a majority in the chamber.
The deciding vote started Friday night and ended early Saturday morning. It also came after a dramatic failed ballot where McCarthy came up one vote short and confronted US Rep. Matt Gaetz on the House floor.
McCarthy strode to the back of the chamber to confront Republican Matt Gaetz, sitting with Lauren Boebert and other holdouts. Fingers were pointed, words exchanged and violence apparently just averted.
Order restored, the Republicans fell in line to give McCarthy the post he had fought so hard to gain, House speaker, second in the line of succession to the presidency.
“My father always told me, it’s not how you start, it’s how you finish,” McCarthy told cheering fellow Republicans.
Eager to confront President Joe Biden and the Democrats, he promised subpoenas and investigations. “Now the hard work begins,” the California Republican declared.
He credited former President Donald Trump for standing with him and for making late calls “helping get those final votes.”
Finally elected, McCarthy took the oath of office, and the House was finally able to swear in newly elected lawmakers who had been waiting all week for the chamber to formally open and the 2023-24 session to begin.
After four days of exhausting ballots, McCarthy flipped more than a dozen conservative holdouts to become supporters, including the chairman of the chamber’s Freedom Caucus.
One significant former holdout; Republican Scott Perry, Chairman of the conservative Freedom Caucus, who had been a leader of Trump’s efforts to challenge the 2020 election, tweeted after his switched vote for McCarthy, “We’re at a turning point.”
Another Republican holdout, Byron Donalds of Florida, who was repeatedly nominated as an alternative candidate for speaker, switched Friday too, voting for McCarthy.
The House adjourned Friday until late in the night, giving time for last-minute negotiations and allowing two absent Republican colleagues to return to Washington.
Newly elected Wesley Hunt of Texas arrived to vote for McCarthy to applause, days after his wife had given birth, as did Ken Buck of Colorado.
The minority Democrats had continued to vote in unison for their leader, New York’s Hakeem Jeffries, the first black person ever to lead a party in Congress.
Friday was the first day that McCarthy’s vote count actually exceeded that of Mr Jeffries.
I Never Thought We’d Get Up Here
McCarthy opened his acceptance speech joking, “that was easy, eh? I never thought we’d get up here.”
The newly elected House Speaker outlined a range of Republican policy objectives that included lowering prices, securing the US-Mexico border and combatting what he described as a “woke indoctrination”.
McCarthy said one of his primary goals was to stop “wasteful Washington spending”.
In his first remarks as speaker early Saturday morning, McCarthy disclosed, “We’ll also address America’s long-term challenges, the debt and the rise of the Chinese communist party.”
“As for the Chinese communist party, we will create a bipartisan select committee on China to investigate how to bring back the hundreds of thousands of jobs that went to China, and then we will win this economic competition.”
Kevin McCarthy
The lawmakers began leaving the Congress around 02:00 local time (07:00 GMT) on Saturday morning. The House is now adjourned until 5 p.m.Monday, January 9, 2023.
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