House GOP Picks Steve Scalise as Their Candidate to Replace McCarthy As Speaker

Alex GriffingOct 11th, 2023, 1:22 pm

The House Republican Conference on Wednesday voted to nominate Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA), the current House Majority Leader, as their candidate for House Speaker.

Following last week’s ouster of Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) by hardline GOP members, Scalise and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) had become the main candidates to replace him. Scalise edged out Jordan by just 14 votes, highlighting the divisions within the House GOP.

Scalise will now need a majority of the House, 217 votes, to become speaker. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) who led the charge to oust McCarthy has already endorsed Scalise calling him an improvement in every way. “There’s a renewed excitement. We’ve got the legend from Louisiana who’s gonna lead us. And I think that he’ll be invigorating to our activists. I think he’ll be a great communicator to the country and I think he’ll do a great job uniting the Republican conference,” Gaetz told NBC’s Sahil Kapur.

.@MattGaetz: “There's a renewed excitement. We’ve got the legend from Louisiana who's gonna lead us. And I think that he'll be invigorating to our activists. I think he'll be a great communicator to the country and I think he’ll do a great job uniting the Republican conference.”

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) October 11, 2023

NBC’s Ryan Nobles noted, however, that Scalise still has an uphill battle to fight inorder to become speaker. “We have to be very clear under these circumstances that this is no guarantee that Steve Scalise will be the next speaker of the House. Republicans are still divided as to how to take this process to the floor of the House of Representatives, because, as you know, it requires at least 217 votes given the current makeup of Congress in order for someone to be elected speaker. And so far, the vote that we saw come out of this internal meeting of House Republicans, which we should point out was a private ballot, was extraordinarily tight,” he reported.

“This this now sets up another confrontation on the House floor, where Scalise is going to have to convince these 99 members that didn’t vote for him today to cast a ballot for him on the House floor. Just another extraordinary development here in this speaker drama and something that we need to emphasize is not something that usually happens here in Congress,” Nobles concluded.

Watch the full clip above via MSNBC.