House speaker calls for Columbia University president's resignation amid ongoing protests

Table Of Content

• House Republicans share schedule of next steps in speaker race and election
• List of speakers of the United States House of Representatives
• Legislative Activity
• Rep. Mike Johnson elected 56th speaker of the House, ending weeks of GOP chaos
• Most Recent Votes
• As McCarthy grasps for the speakership, ‘pork’ has become a focal point.
• Jeffries: Democrats will continue finding common ground with GOP "whenever and wherever possible"

Mainstream conservatives who backed Mr. Johnson said they hoped to quickly move to pull the House out of its funk. Almost immediately after Mr. Johnson was elected, lawmakers began debating a resolution expressing solidarity with Israel and condemning Hamas, which passed overwhelmingly. Mr. Johnson has opposed continued funding for the war in Ukraine, which has emerged as a bitter fault line in the G.O.P. and in the spending battles that he will have to navigate in the coming days. In a speech that traced his ascent up the political ladder in Louisiana to Congress, Mr. Johnson pledged to try to “restore the people’s faith in this House.” He cited sending aid to Israel, fixing a “broken” southern border, and reining in federal spending as his top legislative priorities.

House Republicans share schedule of next steps in speaker race and election

Mr. Johnson immediately faces a host of challenges that dogged his predecessor, Mr. McCarthy. He is confronting a mid-November deadline to pass a measure to fund the government to avert a shutdown. And he will need to lead a conference deeply divided over foreign policy as Congress considers the Biden administration’s $105 billion funding request for Israel, Ukraine and the southern border. Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the first day of the 117th Congress was modified to accommodate guidelines from the Office of Attending Physician, such as social distancing, reducing the number of guests and staff allowed in the chamber, and mask wearing.

List of speakers of the United States House of Representatives

House conservatives are signaling they’ll give the newly minted House Speaker Mike Johnson some runway and flexibility as the House barrels toward a November 17 spending deadline to fund the government. Information about travel-related expenses incurred by representatives who are reimbursed by non-government sources. Elected by their peers, certain representatives hold positions that combine institutional, administrative and partisan roles. Hakeem Jeffries made history as the first Black lawmaker to lead a party in Congress, addressing the 118th Congress for the first time in the early hours of Saturday morning. Massachusetts Rep. Katherine Clark assumed her role as House minority whip in the early hours of Saturday morning, becoming the highest-ranking Democratic woman in the chamber. Both Democrats and Republicans made strides in diversifying their congressional ranks in the November midterm elections, with several historic milestones reached and a record number of women elected.

Legislative Activity

Ms. Cole previously served as a clerk on the House Financial Services Committee and was appointed as the House reading clerk in 2007 by John Boehner, who was then the House minority leader, according to Roll Call. Reading clerks, who are often described as the “voice of the House,” are responsible for reading bills, resolutions, motions and more on the House floor, and for reporting the chamber’s legislative actions to the Senate. Mr. Trump’s call into the chamber came on the two-year anniversary of the riot by his supporters to block congressional certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s win over Mr. Trump.

Rep. Mike Johnson elected 56th speaker of the House, ending weeks of GOP chaos

He said that millions of unborn children had lost their lives because of what he called a “legal fiction that the Supreme Court foisted upon this country” and said that “God will bless us” for the court’s decision. But even more than his election denialism, Mr. Johnson’s political career has been defined by his religious views. “Experts project that homosexual marriage is the dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic,” he wrote in one such article in 2004.

Johnson listed a number of his priorities, including border security, cutting federal spending and establishing a bipartisan debt commission "immediately." "I think all the American people at one time had great pride in this institution, but right now that's in jeopardy," he said. Johnson also acknowledged that the chaos of the last three weeks has chipped away at Americans' confidence in the lower chamber. "I want to say to the American people on behalf of all of us here, we hear you. We know the challenges you're facing. We know that there's a lot going on in our country, domestically and abroad, and we're ready to get to work again to solve those problems and we will," he said.

These 112 House Republicans voted against Ukraine aid

The GOP speaker, however, has grown more willing to confront the threat from the right, and Democrats have suggested that they're willing to protect him from an ouster effort if he allowed a vote on Ukraine aid. Saturday's vote marked the first time the House had approved billions of dollars in Ukraine aid since December 2022, when Democrats still controlled the chamber. The bill is widely expected to pass the Senate in the coming days, as it generally mirrors a $95.3 billion national security bill passed by the upper chamber in February.

As McCarthy grasps for the speakership, ‘pork’ has become a focal point.

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. 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. Such steps, however, would inevitably prolong the process of approving spending bills. When Representative Chip Roy of Texas, then a freshman and now one of Mr. McCarthy’s most vocal opponents, forced roll call votes on every amendment in spending bills in 2019, the process of approving them dragged on for two weeks. The year was 1923, the last time the House required multiple days and repeated votes to settle on a new speaker before this week’s continuing stalemate over the candidacy of Representative Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California. Republicans have now spurned all three of their top leaders over the past few weeks.

Lauren Boebert Gets Support for Becoming House Speaker - Newsweek

Lauren Boebert Gets Support for Becoming House Speaker.

Posted: Sun, 21 Apr 2024 20:17:04 GMT [source]

To show support for racial equality, Mr. Johnson in the past has told audiences that he and his wife adopted a Black teenager they met through an evangelical youth group — like the movie “The Blind Side” but without the N.F.L. prospects, he has quipped. Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 House Republican and the first to be nominated for speaker following Mr. McCarthy’s ouster, was ultimately seen as insufficiently pro-Trump by too many of his colleagues. He also opposed legislation to mandate federal recognition for same-sex marriages — a bill that passed with strong bipartisan support in both the House and the Senate. In Congress, Mr. Johnson has voted for a national abortion ban and co-sponsored a 20-week abortion ban, earning him an A-plus rating from the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. After the Supreme Court voted to overturn Roe v. Wade in June last year, he celebrated.

“The empty chair is such poetry,” one onlooker said before the vote, pointing at the screen. A bartender switched the channel from basketball to C-SPAN about 10 minutes before the vote was set to start, but it was only when the session was called to order that the rowdy crowd turned its attention fully to the screens, hooting and clapping. Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, had declined yet again to vote for Representative Kevin McCarthy of California on a 14th ballot, helping sink McCarthy’s chances at speaker that round. Congratulations to @GOPLeader on his election as the Speaker of 🇺🇸 House of Representatives. We’re counting on your continued support and further U.S. assistance to bring our common victory closer. Left unmentioned was that many of the same rebels who helped lead the effort in Congress to overturn the 2020 election, giving rise to the assault that day, were also among the final holdouts working to block Mr. McCarthy’s ascent.

On the eve of the Jan. 6 votes, Mr. Johnson had honed his arguments undermining the election to be more palatable. He presented colleagues with arguments they could use to oppose the will of the voters without embracing conspiracy theories and the lies of widespread fraud pushed by Mr. Trump. Mr. Johnson instead faulted the way some states had changed voting procedures during the pandemic, saying it was unconstitutional. No credible evidence has ever emerged to support the conspiracy theories about Dominion and another voting machine firm having helped to ensure Mr. Trump’s defeat. In April, Fox News agreed to pay $787.5 million to settle a defamation suit by Dominion over reports broadcast by Fox that Dominion machines were susceptible to hacking and had flipped votes from Mr. Trump to Mr. Biden. If Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio was the most prominent public face of the congressional effort to fight the results of the 2020 election, his mentee, the newly elected Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, was a silent but pivotal partner.

He swore in the chamber’s members, ending days of paralysis at the start of Republican rule. An earlier version of this article misstated the number of votes Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana received in House Republicans’ internal election to choose a speaker nominee. House Republicans chose and then quickly repudiated yet another of their nominees for speaker on Tuesday and rushed to name a fourth, pressing to put an end to a remarkable three-week-long deadlock that has left Congress leaderless and paralyzed.

If the House speaker election has felt endless to you, take a second to imagine the experiences of the chamber’s reading clerks — the two people who have read out the names of every representative in attendance, and recorded their votes, 13 times now, with a 14th expected Friday night. The protracted fight foreshadowed how difficult it would be for him to govern with an exceedingly narrow majority and an unruly hard-right faction bent on slashing spending and disrupting business in Washington. The speakership struggle that crippled the House before it had even opened its session suggested that basic tasks such as passing government funding bills or financing the federal debt would prompt epic struggles over the next two years.

“We’re going to show not only Israel but the entire world that the barbarism of Hamas" is "wretched and wrong,” he said. “We went through a lot to get here, but we are ready to govern and that will begin right away,” Johnson says in his first news conference as speaker. Representative Ken Buck of Colorado said that Mr. Johnson was not involved in postelection efforts to invalidate the results, even though Mr. Johnson was a critical player in those activities. The vote put him second in line to the presidency, capping an extraordinary period of twists and turns on Capitol Hill. It marked a victory for the far right that has become a dominant force in the Republican Party, which rose up this month to effectively dictate the removal of an establishment speaker and the installation of an arch-conservative replacement. Exhausted from the feuding, which unleashed a barrage of recriminations and violent threats against lawmakers, both the right wing and mainstream Republicans finally united to elect Mr. Johnson, 51, in a 220-to-209 vote.

GOP lawmakers who withheld their support for Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio during his three rounds of voting on the House floor are beginning to line up behind Johnson. If all 221 Republicans and 212 Democrats mark themselves present, Johnson will need 217 votes to win the gavel. Two seats are vacant due to the resignations of Reps. Chris Stewart, a Republican from Utah, and David Cicilline, a Democrat from Rhode Island.