The Daily - The House Finally Has a Speaker

Episode Date: October 26, 2023

Warning: this episode contains strong language.After 21 days without a leader, and after cycling through four nominees, House Republicans have finally elected a speaker. They chose Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana, a hard-right conservative best known for leading congressional efforts to overturn the 2020 election.Luke Broadwater, a congressional reporter for The Times, was at the capitol when it happened.Guest: Luke Broadwater, a congressional correspondent for The New York Times.Background reading: The House elected Mike Johnson as speaker, embracing a hard-right conservative.Speaker Johnson previously played a leading role in the effort to overturn the 2020 election results.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. On behalf of the House Republican Conference, I rise today to nominate the gentleman from Louisiana, Mike Johnson, as Speaker of the People's House. Mike Johnson as Speaker of the People's House. After 21 days without a leader, and after cycling through four different nominees, House Republicans have finally elected a Speaker to lead the chamber.

Therefore, the Honorable Mike Johnson of the state of Louisiana, having received a majority of the votes cast, is duly elected Speaker of the House of Representatives for the 118th Congress. My colleague, congressional reporter Luke Broadwater, was inside the Capitol as it happened. The committee will retire from to the chair. It's Thursday, October 26th. So Luke, it's 2.32 p.m. and you just raced into a phone booth inside the Capitol to talk to us, which was very nice of you, because it entailed tearing yourself away from a historic scene that was unfolding. And I want you to describe that scene. Yes, I was in the Speaker's lobby watching Republicans elect a new Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson of Louisiana. He had just won. They were lining up

all the dignitaries in leadership to honor this new Speaker. And there was a bit of a debate going on about who would present him the gavel. Would it be the former Speaker, the temporary speaker, or the leader of the House Democrats. And this was a monumental occasion because for more than three weeks now, the House has been paralyzed. No legislation has been able to move. No aid for any of our allies overseas has been able to be approved, and a government shutdown is looming. And Republicans had been fighting amongst themselves bitterly through candidate after candidate unsuccessfully until they landed on Mike Johnson, who received a unanimous vote of his fellow House Republicans and now has the mandate

to get the Congress back to work. Right. I think the key word there is unanimous, which seems pretty improbable given the battle we've just been through. And I want to kind of set the stage for this conversation because the last time we covered this seemingly endless soap opera, Representative Jim Jordan was the nominee. And it looked like Jordan was going to be the next speaker, despite his reputation for being very far to the right, an obstructionist, in the words of a former speaker, John Boehner, a legislative terrorist. So pick up the story from there and help us understand how we get to this moment. Right. Jim Jordan was in the fight of his life to try to become the next House Speaker, and he had unleashed a pressure campaign against the holdouts from the more mainstream wing of the party

that were refusing to vote for him. On Capitol Hill now, some Republicans who voted against GOP Congressman Jim Jordan to be the next Speaker of the House say they're getting death threats. Threats and intimidation started to come in. Including Iowa's Marionette Miller-Meeks. She said she's getting credible death threats and a barrage of threatening calls, but will not... People started getting the personal cell phone numbers of members of Congress and their families.

Why is your husband such a pig? Because he's a deep state prick, because he doesn't represent the people. At one point, a congressman said that his wife had begun to sleep with a gun at night because of the threats against the family. And it was just getting uglier and uglier. And it actually had the reverse effect. Instead of the moderates buckling under the pressure campaign, they dug in deeper to find the resolve and to fight back against these tactics. Right. The idea had been that Jordan was going to activate this far-right network, the party's base, to hound these moderate lawmakers and make them feel like they didn't really have a choice. They had to vote for Jordan or perhaps they'd lose re-election, but it turned out they did have a choice. And that choice was to

create this unmovable block of moderate Republicans who basically said to Jim Jordan, your tactics are beyond the pale. This is not acceptable. You will not be our speaker. And because Republicans have such a tight majority, it didn't take that many moderates to block him. Now, I will say Jim Jordan says he had nothing to do with the pressure campaign, that he can't control outside groups that were lobbying for him. But that said, his supporters really offended many members of Congress. And because of the slim margins in Congress, any Republican speaker candidate can only afford to lose four fellow Republican votes, provided all the Democrats vote against the Republican, which is, you know, the way the chamber operates.

The next order of business is the election of speakers of the House of Representatives for the 118th Congress. Nominations are now in order. And Jim Jordan ended up losing 25 fellow Republican votes. I rise today to nominate the gentleman from Ohio, Jim Jordan, as Speaker of the People's House. And he lost them over a course of three different floor votes. And each time the opposition to Jim Jordan grew. The total number of votes cast is 432, of which the Honorable Jim Jordan of the state of Ohio has received 200 votes.

On the first vote, there were 20 Republicans opposed to him. No person having received a majority of the whole number of votes cast by surname. A speaker has not been elected. By the second, as the calls kept coming in. Of placing in nomination the name of the Honorable Jim Jordan. It rose to 22 against him. A speaker has not been elected. As more calls flooded in.

I rise to nominate Jim Jordan for the Speaker of the House. The opposition rose to 25. No person having received a majority of the whole number of votes cast by surname, a speaker has not been elected. Fellow Republicans standing firm in opposition to Jim Jordan. One, the chair declares the House in recess, subject to the call of the chair. Right. This was the revenge of the Republican moderates. And it felt like a very distinct moment in time. And the lesson seemed to be, give us, give the Republicans in the House a much more mainstream candidate to be our speaker. candidate to be our speaker. Yeah, absolutely. You know, for years in Congress, the Republican Party has had something of a civil war, but it was almost always the case that the hard right faction led by the House Freedom Caucus would use the tougher tactics. And so they would get their

way. And it was kind of a running joke on the hill that the moderates always cave. That's the reason they're moderates, because they always want to compromise and make people happy. Right. There's even a nickname for these moderates. Right, exactly. Some of the hard right members call them the squishes. And for the first time that anyone can remember, the moderates stood up for themselves, and they stood up in the face of this pressure campaign, and they blocked Jim Jordan. And that sent a message, I think a lot of us in the press corps believed, that there would be a demand for a more mainstream or moderate moderate candidate. And that led to the nomination of Tom Emmer of Minnesota on Tuesday afternoon, who is the number three House Republican and perhaps the most moderate of all the potential

candidates or leading candidates that have had a real chance at becoming Speaker this year. And what makes him so moderate? Well, he has taken a number of votes that I don't think seem that moderate to much of the country, but they do to the hard right. For instance, he voted to prevent discrimination against same-sex couples, and he refused to object to certifying President Biden's 2020 victory at a time when Donald Trump was putting intense pressure on House Republicans to overturn the election and keep him as the president.

So Emmer's kind of a moderate House Republicans dream candidate for the speakership. But of course, we know that overall, House Republicans are not so moderate. So how does Emmer contend with that? So Emmer is hopeful that he has the backing of the mainstream Republicans, but also has won enough friends on the hard right to make sure that he can become speaker. But what becomes quickly apparent is that although a majority of House Republicans support Tom Emmer, Donald Trump does not. Donald Trump, the de facto leader of the Republican Party who has a lot of influence in the House Republican Conference, just put out a blistering statement attacking Tom Emmer. Here's what Trump said.

Voting for a globalist rhino like Tom Emmer would be a tragic mistake. And allies of Donald Trump go out on the airwaves and on their podcasts. I couldn't support Tom Emmer. We need a Speaker of the House that reflects the values and the views of Republican voters across the country. And they support President Trump. And they support his agenda. And Tom Emmer does not.

And start ripping him apart. He certified the fake election. He has been the wrong vote every single time. He is Nancy Pelosi in a suit. They say he's not loyal to Trump. And everyone who watches the War Room Posse in the show needs to fight Tom Emmer every step of the way. Emmer starts defending himself. He endorsed Donald Trump twice. He has pictures of him with Donald Trump in his office.

He starts circulating those photos to media outlets to show how loyal he is to Donald Trump. But it's still not enough for the hard right. So just four hours after he becomes the nominee, despite winning a majority of the votes, Despite winning a majority of the votes, there are still about two dozen hard right house Republicans standing in opposition to him, refusing to vote for Tom Emmer. And Tom Emmer sees no other way out of this than toates to kill a Jordan candidacy, but the speaker. And so after Tom Emmer is deposed, six more Republicans throw their names in as potential candidates. Because basically everyone thinks like, why not me? Right. Yeah. I mean, there's a joke that every senator looks in the mirror and sees a president

and we're quickly learning that every member of the House, every senator looks in the mirror and sees a president. And we're quickly learning that every member of the House, every male member of the House, I might say, looks in the mirror and sees a speaker. Hmm. And so what happens to all these men looking in the mirror, seeing a speaker? Well, six of them vie for the next round of votes. I guess this is the fifth time Republicans will try to nominate a speaker. And one name starts to rise above all the others. Democracy is messy sometimes, but it is our system. And that is someone who's far to the right of Tom Emmer, who has no problem with objecting to the 2020 election results. This conference that you see, this House Republican majority, is united. And that is Mike Johnson of Louisiana.

This is servant leadership. We're going to serve the people of this country. We're going to restore their faith in this Congress, this institution. We'll be right back. So, Luke, tell us about this fourth nominee to be the Republican House Speaker, who, I'm going to be really honest, I had never heard of before now. Right. And there's a good reason you haven't heard of him. He hasn't been in Congress that long. He's not the chairman of any major committee. He is, in fact, not the chairman of any committee.

And he's kind of a little-known member of Congress. But here's what we do know about Mike Johnson. He is very conservative, and he's also very religious. Welcome back to Truth Be Told. I'm Mike Johnson. And I'm Kelly Johnson. He hosts a podcast with his wife that's focused on Christianity. Today, we're going to provide an answer to the question that has been asked by countless hundreds of millions of people, and probably by all of us at one point or another, how do I find

God's will for my life? He often talks about being an evangelical Christian, and those Christian views, those conservative Christian views, really do shape his politics. Roe v. Wade gave constitutional cover to the elective killing of unborn children in America, period. You think about the implications of that. He's also very close with Jim Jordan. The two of them have traveled to Israel together to meet with Benjamin and Yahoo.

When you and Kelly went with Polly and I to Israel a couple years ago, what a good time we had and a chance to learn about our great friend and ally, the state of Israel. Jim Jordan serves as a mentor to him and sort of helped him run for Congress originally and flew him out to meet with the House Freedom Caucus guys. And just like Jim Jordan is very loyal to Donald Trump, so is Mike Johnson. If Jim Jordan was the public face of fighting the 2020 election results in Congress, Mike Johnson was his silent partner. He was the constitutional lawyer behind the scenes coming up with various legal ways and theories that Congress could try to overturn the results of the election. to overturn the results of the election. The first thing he did was he tried to get members of Congress to sign on to an ultimately failed lawsuit to throw out Joe Biden's victory

in four different states. That lawsuit's rejected by the Supreme Court, but not before Mike Johnson gets 60% of House Republicans to sign on to it. And he does this by telling them he has spoken with President Trump, and President Trump will be looking at the list of names and taking account of who supported him and who didn't. Interesting. So Johnson seems even further to the right than Jim Jordan, and thus, I would imagine, very unpalatable to those 20 or so moderates

who had such problems with Jordan. Yeah, a lot of us in the press corps thought when we heard his name that, you know, moderates would stand against him as they did against Jim Jordan. But this time, that just didn't happen. Well, why not? Why would moderates not object to him? Well, I think there's a couple reasons. Some of the moderates we talked to in the hallways said, essentially, they were weighing the continued dysfunction of the House and the need to get back to business against how right-wing Johnson is. So was it worse for them to have Mike Johnson as speaker

and potentially support a right-wing candidate when they're from a district that's more of a swing district or a purple district? Or was it worse to continue the three-ring circus taking place on Capitol Hill, head towards a government shutdown, deny funding for our allies overseas? So you can see how they looked at the situation and arrived at the result that it was better for them to vote for somebody just so they could get back to business. Right. You're saying these moderates start to worry less about picking the wrong speaker and the political repercussions of that than they do about picking no speaker and being associated with a deeply dysfunctional Congress because voters don't like that either.

That's exactly right. And one thing that differentiates Johnson from Jordan is that he doesn't have the baggage in some members' views as Jordan did. by a previous Republican speaker as a legislative terrorist. And he had blown up a bunch of bills to fund the government and sort of the basic bills of keeping the place open. And so there were long memories about Jordan's misdeeds in their mind. And Johnson just doesn't have the bad blood with his fellow Republicans that Jordan does. And so that combined with the fact that there's a lot of fatigue on the Hill, people are sick of not having a speaker, they're sick of going home on the weekend and having their constituents yell at them because they're so dysfunctional. And all of that built up to really a glide path for Mike Johnson, a guy who would have had probably no chance of becoming Speaker a month ago, to having the unanimous support of his conference.

Right. So I want to just review the journey that we have been on. Kevin McCarthy is ousted as Speaker by these far-right members of the House, just eight of them. The first nominee to replace him ends up being rejected as insufficiently conservative. The second nominee is knocked out not because he's not conservative enough, Jim Jordan was, but because he's personally kind of hated. The third nominee fails because he's not conservative enough, Tom Emmer. And ultimately, the winner is a very, very conservative member, Mike Johnson. So there's not a lot of mystery about, ideologically speaking, who won here.

House conservatives won. So how should we think about why this was such an ugly 21-day war among people who largely seem like they're on the same page. In many ways, this is really the first sort of MAGA-controlled House. Before this, we had Democrats in charge of the House, or we had Republican speakers who were more in line with the old Republican Party, right? The more business-minded wing of the party who cared about small budgets and aggressive military. Now it's a much more populist party that's remade in Donald Trump's image. It's people, for the most part, who don't like the status quo, who want to tear down the establishment, who want to blow things up. And so when you have a ton of people like that

in the same room, it's essentially a wrecking ball that's flying around all the time. And it's unclear who's going to be hit at any given time. And so we saw over the course of this first year of this Congress, an unprecedented five different speaker nominees. And then what did they get out of the fifth nominee? The most conservative, the most hard right, the guy who literally did Donald Trump's bidding in trying to overturn the election, who actually served as one of his lawyers at one point in time and as an advisor. as one of his lawyers at one point in time and as an advisor. And in fact, Matt Gaetz, who is the member of Congress who got Kevin McCarthy kicked out as Speaker, goes on Steve Bannon's podcast, Steve Bannon, a Trump ally. It is going to be a great moment for the House. And you know what? At the very end. And boasts that they have had an upgrade at Speaker. And the swamp is on the run. MAGA is ascendant.

And if you don't think that moving from Kevin McCarthy to MAGA Mike Johnson shows the ascendance of this movement and where the power in the Republican Party truly lies, then you're not paying attention. But they are. They've got a more MAGA member who is now leading the United States House of Representatives. But Luke, this outcome, it feels like potentially a momentary pause in that ever-swinging wrecking ball within MAGA House Republican politics. And that pause, where everyone can get on the same page before they begin wrecking each other again, it might be a few months, it might be a few days, it might be a few hours. We don't really know. And so how should we think about Mike Johnson's chances of being a successful speaker? Because

21 days ago, the first chapter of this began, a speaker was ousted. That could happen all over again, given everything you just said. Right. Well, Mike Johnson has been able to do something that no other speaker candidate could do. He was able to unite House Republicans in a way no one else has. He looks like he has the command of the party. But that said, this is a particularly unruly Congress. Mike Johnson will probably have a grace period for some period of time, but eventually he's going to have to make some decisions about keeping the government open, about the debt. And it's hard not to see a scenario where some of the same complaints and concerns that the hard right had with Kevin McCarthy might come back to Mike Johnson. Keep in mind the same rule that hard-right Republicans use

to oust McCarthy is still in effect in the Congress. So at any point, a member can call, can force a vote to remove a speaker. This Congress has been one that ends up eating its own. This Congress has been one that ends up eating its own. And so the test for Mike Johnson will be, how long can he hold off until they eat him too? Well, Luke, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thank you, Michael. And this group will deliver for the American people.

I said it in the chamber and I will say it here. We're going to govern well. On Wednesday afternoon, about an hour after his election, Speaker Johnson held a brief news conference on the steps of the Capitol. We're so grateful. I'm so grateful and so humbled to have gotten a unanimous vote on the floor by all of my colleagues here. Johnson said he would dispense with the usual ceremonies and celebrations of a new speaker and immediately get to work. We went through a lot to get here, but we are ready to govern,

and that will begin right away. You've all heard me talk a lot today, and I'm not going to belabor the point because the sun is bright and it's too warm for the fall. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. At least seven people were killed and many more injured in a mass shooting in the town of Lewiston, Maine, where a gunman reportedly opened fire at a restaurant and bowling alley.

As of Thursday morning, a massive manhunt was underway to capture the shooter, who was caught on camera using what appeared to be an assault rifle. Lewiston, Maine's second biggest city, is about 40 miles north of Portland and home to Bates College, where students were told to shelter in place. And on Wednesday, with little warning, Hurricane Otis made landfall

near the Mexican resort town of Acapulco as a catastrophic Category 5 hurricane. Unlike most storms that intensify slowly and are tracked closely by meteorologists, Otis gained strength with stunning speed, its winds growing by 110 miles per hour in just 24 hours. In interviews and social media posts, residents and tourists described widespread damage from the storm. Today's episode was produced by Michael Simon-Johnson and Rochelle Banja. It was edited by Rachel Quester and Lexi Diao, contains original music by Brad Fisher,

Dan Powell, and Marion Lozano, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansford of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.