Scalise, Jordan, Trump

Our 2020 book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good.  

Paul Kane at WP:

Despite a boisterous endorsement of Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) to be the next speaker, Trump’s pick got just 99 votes in the behind-closed-doors vote in a sprawling committee room, less than 45 percent of the GOP caucus.

Instead, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) leveraged his long tenure in multiple leadership positions over the past decade to secure the nomination, winning with a time-honored inside game that was built on personal relationships with lawmakers and not outside endorsements.

Currently the House majority leader, Scalise still faces some doubt that he can unify Republican ranks enough to get the necessary 217 votes, out of 221 eligible GOP votes, when the full House holds its roll call later this week.

Scalise vanquished Jordan despite the Judiciary Committee chair’s higher-profile campaign, beginning with Trump’s “complete” and “total” endorsement Saturday in a social media post

Scooplet: Trump Not Expected to Help Scalise in Speaker Bid (Exclusive)

Three sources close to Trump tell me and @MarcACaputo that he isn't planning to come to the aid of Scalise, who is having trouble securing enough support to become speaker.https://t.co/kOHZs3Rp69

— Stephen Neukam (@stephen_neukam) October 12, 2023

Inside Game, Outside Game

 Our 2020 book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good.  

POLITICO Playbook:

INSIDE VS. OUTSIDE — The speakership race between Reps. STEVE SCALISE and JIM JORDAN is turning into a test of two very different strategies.

Scalise is running the way successful speakers always have: by focusing assiduously on the inside game of member-to-member lobbying. In Scalise world, the way to win next week’s secret ballot election is to break down the conference into granular Scalise-friendly factions that he can cobble together into a majority.

Scalise is the second-most-prolific GOP fundraiser after KEVIN McCARTHY, and his team is making sure the recipients of his largesse remember that. He’s a former whip in a chamber where serving on a whip team is a bonding experience. He’s a southerner in a party that is dominated by that region of the country. He’s targeting colleagues who sit with him on the Energy and Commerce Committee. He’s counting on committee chairmen who are close to leadership and wary of Jordan’s Freedom Caucus roots. And despite the fact that he once led the Republican Study Committee, the jovial Scalise is wooing moderates freaked out by the idea of making Jordan the face of their party.

There are lots of ways that members bond that defy the typical GOP categories, and you hear a lot about these relationships from Scalise world. “@SteveScalise and I were elected to Congress together through special elections and became close friends,” Rep. ROB WITTMAN of Virginia said on X last night. “I am proud to support him for Speaker of the House.”

It’s not that Jordan doesn’t have similar pockets in the House to target. He does. He’ll do well with most of the nine other Republicans in the Ohio delegation, with the MAGA right, with Judiciary Committee colleagues who will want to support their chair, with some McCarthy allies who had beef with Scalise.

But Jordan is running much more of an outside game, trying to leverage the modern conservative media world and its best-known influencers to pressure Republicans to back him. And early this morning, he won the backing of the ultimate GOP outsider: DONALD TRUMP.

The War on the Floor, 2023

 Our recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good. 

 Melanie Zanona and Manu Raju at CNN:

A conservative revolt paralyzing the House has set off a bitter blame game among the upper ranks of GOP leadership, with top Republicans scrambling to defuse internal tensions that have spilled out into public view – and take some of the heat off themselves.

Privately, allies of Speaker Kevin McCarthy have directed their frustration at his top deputy, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, for Tuesday’s surprise floor defeat when a band of Republicans tanked a procedural vote on a GOP messaging bill – a move that has halted all action in the House and showed the limits of the speaker’s power in his narrow majority.

McCarthy’s allies say there’s a reason for the current standoff: Scalise mishandled a demand by a conservative hardliner, Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia, for a vote on a bill to loosen a gun regulation. And they thought Scalise should have just apologized to Clyde before it grew into a bigger problem with more members coming forward with their own list of demands and grievances.

But Scalise’s allies believe it falls on McCarthy, whose deal-cutting with President Joe Biden to suspend the debt limit prompted accusations from the far-right that he violated the terms of his January agreement to become speaker. Scalise did not play a role in either of those deals.

In 1997, Bill Connelly and I wrote of another House GOP civil war.