Will Thomas Massie Get To Pick the Next Speaker of the House?
It’s nearly time once again for everyone’s favorite congressional game show: Who Can Get Elected Speaker of the House?
When the new session of Congress opens on Friday, one of the first orders of business will be deciding who gets to hold the gavel. Despite a Republican takeover of the White House and the Senate, November’s election did not do much to change or lessen the drama in the House, where the GOP still clings to a very narrow majority. As in the past few years, that means any Republican who wants to be speaker needs to secure support from nearly all of his party’s members in the chamber.
Current Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R–La.) has the “Complete & Total Endorsement” of President-elect Donald Trump in his bid to retain the gavel. That might be all it takes to come out on top. It certainly doesn’t hurt. Resistance to Johnson’s reelection “is now futile,” former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R–Fla.), who led the effort to oust Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R–Calif.) from the speakership, told the New York Post earlier this week.
But nothing is a sure bet in this House of Representatives until the last votes have been counted, and there’s at least one Republican who is vowing to resist Johnson’s reelection.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.), the libertarian-adjacent lawmaker who holds a post on the powerful House Rules Committee, tells The Wall Street Journal that he will vote against Johnson’s reelection as speaker. And he apparently doesn’t care what consequences he might face for complicating the speakership vote.
“I don’t know how to say this without cussing,” Massie told the Journal. “If they thought I had no Fs to give before, I definitely have no Fs to give now.” (That’s possibly the second-best Massie quote of all time, though it’s still well behind his 2017 theory of what Republican primary voters are doing.)
Specifically, Massie is upset with Johnson over his support for military aid to Ukraine, his support for reauthorizing a domestic spying program, and his handling of the con
Article from Reason.com
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