Emmer withdraws speakership candidacy It looks like Tom Emmer is out of the speakership scramble… Emmer has dropped out of the race, per multiple reports, including the Washington Post, CNN and NBC. The Minnesota congressman is the third Republican speaker nominee since Kevin McCarthy was ousted. Emmer goes the way of representatives Steve Scalise and Jim Jordan, neither of whom was able to unite their party’s far-right and moderate factions to back them. Emmer’s bid lasted just a few hours – he was nominated by the House GOP at lunchtime. Report: former chief of staff testifies that Trump was warned about false election claims Donald Trump’s former White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, spoke with the special counsel investigating the former president several times, testifying that Trump was told repeatedly that his allegations of voting fraud were baseless, according to ABC. Per ABC, which sites unnamed sources familiar with the matter: The sources said Meadows informed [special counsel Jack] Smith’s team that he repeatedly told Trump in the weeks after the 2020 presidential election that the allegations of significant voting fraud coming to them were baseless, a striking break from Trump’s prolific rhetoric regarding the election. Meadows also told the federal investigators Trump was being “dishonest” with the public when he first claimed to have won the election only hours after polls closed on Nov. 3, 2020, before final results were in. Such testimony would be among the most damning evidence yet in special counsel’s case alleging that Trump tried to unlawfully retain power after losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden. On Fox Business, far-right representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said she couldn’t support Tom Emmer because he hadn’t supported a ban on trans people serving in the military, and because he supported the “voting rights … national voting movement that was completely against what we stand for”. Emmer withdraws speakership candidacy It looks like Tom Emmer is out of the speakership scramble… Emmer has dropped out of the race, per multiple reports, including the Washington Post, CNN and NBC. The Minnesota congressman is the third Republican speaker nominee since Kevin McCarthy was ousted. Emmer goes the way of representatives Steve Scalise and Jim Jordan, neither of whom was able to unite their party’s far-right and moderate factions to back them. Emmer’s bid lasted just a few hours – he was nominated by the House GOP at lunchtime. House GOP convenes as Tom Emmer"s speaker candidacy faces serious opposition Punchbowl News reports that Republicans are returning to a Capitol complex meeting room for behind-closed-door discussions that could decide whether they move forward with Tom Emmer’s candidacy as speaker: The Minnesota congressman, who, as the party’s whip is the third-highest-ranking Republican in the House, won the GOP nomination for speaker this afternoon, but now faces opposition from perhaps 26 of his counterparts – which means defeat in a floor vote. We’ll be looking out for details on what Republicans decide at this meeting. Earlier in the day, House Democratic caucus chair Pete Aguilar weighed in on congressman Dean Phillips’s attempt to make a deal with Republicans. The Minnesota Democrat had suggested he would be willing to vote “present” and lower the threshold for Republican Tom Emmer to win election as speaker on the House floor in exchange for policy concessions around aid to Ukraine and Israel, among other things. That would represent a break from Democrats’ tactics ever since Kevin McCarthy was ousted, which have generally involved sitting back and doing nothing while the GOP fights among themselves. But with perhaps 26 Republicans willing to oppose his candidacy as speaker, it would not be enough to save Emmer, and Aguilar made clear the rest of the party is not on board. The ranks of Tom Emmer’s detractors appear to be growing. Rightwing Florida congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna is not among those reported to have voted against Emmer behind closed doors, but now says she would oppose him on the House floor: That could mean his opponents number 27, which would guarantee his defeat. Wondering who exactly is this Tom Emmer fellow, emerged from the (figurative) wilds of Minnesota to be the latest Republican congressman (all men, so far) to attempt to grasp and keep hold of the gavel of the speaker of the US House? Let the Guardian’s Sam Levine enlighten you: The Minnesota congressman Tom Emmer will now be the third party leader to try to galvanize enough support among Republicans after Steve Scalise of Louisiana and Jim Jordan of Ohio failed in their bids to be House speaker. It remains unclear if Emmer will be able to get the 217 votes he needs to be speaker, but – for the moment at least – he is in the center of the ongoing crisis gripping the party and causing chaos in the heart of US government. Emmer was elected to Congress in 2014, replacing Michele Bachmann, a far-right figutr who was one of the earliest Tea Party stars. When he initially ran to replace her, he was described as “Bachmann 2.0”, by the left-leaning Mother Jones magazine, but after he was elected he said he would be more low key. Emmer represents Minnesota’s sixth congressional district, which includes a partial ring of Minneapolis suburbs and extends north-west from the city. The district is solidly conservative: Donald Trump carried it in 2020 by more than 17 points. Emmer broke with many of his Republican colleagues and voted to certify the 2020 election. “Simply put, Congress does not have the authority to discard an individual slate of electors certified by a state’s legislature in accordance with their constitution,” he said. He did, however, sign on to a brief at the supreme court urging the justices to throw out the electoral votes from key swing states and suggested there may have been fraud as he supported Trump’s legal challenges to the election results, CNN reported. Courtesy of Politico, here is a full list of all of Tom Emmer’s opponents among the House GOP, and who they voted for. As you can see, many cast ballots for Jim Jordan, a prominent rightwing lawmaker and 2020 election denier who last week abandoned his bid for speaker after concluding he could not win a floor vote: CNN, meanwhile, heard from Indiana’s Jim Banks, who had no problems pillorying Emmer: Tom Emmer’s issues with Donald Trump and his allies are well known, and it appeared the Minnesota congressman had moved to address them. While campaigning in New Hampshire yesterday, the former president batted away a question about whether he was opposed to Emmer becoming speaker – video of which was posted by the congressman, as a sign he had Trump’s support: It was apparently all for naught, since Trump has now put out a strongly worded statement against Emmer. Politico had a good rundown over the weekend of why Trump is opposed to Emmer, who is notable for not supporting attempts to certify election results in swing states that voted for Joe Biden in 2020, as some of the other speaker candidates had. Here’s more from Politico: The former president’s top allies are already working to thwart Emmer’s candidacy. Trump supporters have begun passing around opposition research on the congressmember, and the pro-Trump “War Room” podcast on Friday afternoon turned into an Emmer bash-fest. During an appearance on the program, top Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn noted that Emmer had yet to endorse Trump in the Republican presidential primary. “If somebody is so out of step with where the Republican electorate is, where the MAGA movement is, how can they even be in the conversation?” Epshteyn said. “We need a MAGA speaker. That’s what it comes down to. Because if you look at the numbers, if you look at the energy, if you look at the heat, this is the Trump party, this is the MAGA party. It is no longer the old-school khaki establishment Republican Party.” Steve Bannon, a former Trump White House adviser and the “War Room” host, chimed in to call Emmer a “Trump hater.” Others close to Trump said Emmer as speaker would open a breach between House Republicans and their likely presidential nominee. Emmer “has no relationship with Trump,” one adviser said. Trump attacks Emmer as "RINO", says supporting him "would be a tragic mistake" And … Donald Trump hath spoken. And … he isn’t a fan of Tom Emmer, the current choice of the Republican party to be speaker of the US House. I have many wonderful friends wanting to be Speaker of the House, and some are truly great Warriors. RINO Tom Emmer, who I do not know well, is not one of them. He never respected the Power of a Trump Endorsement, or the breadth and scope of MAGA – MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! He fought me all the way, and actually spent more time defending Ilhan Omar, than he did me—He is totally out-of-touch with Republican Voters. I believe he has now learned his lesson, because he is saying that he is Pro-Trump all the way, but who can ever be sure? Has he only changed because that’s what it takes to win? The Republican Party cannot take that chance, because that’s not where the America First Voters are. Voting for a Globalist RINO like Tom Emmer would be a tragic mistake! That word salad brought to you by Truth Social, of course. Whether Emmer has “fought Trump all the way” or not is, to put it mildly, doubtful. He didn’t vote to overturn the 2020 election but he did sign on to a lawsuit seeking to throw out results, and so forth. Ilhan Omar, meanwhile, is a Democratic representative from Minnesota – Emmer’s state – a migrant from Somalia, both one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress and a leading progressive, part of a so-called “Squad” of left-leaning Democratic women. In July 2019, a crowd at a Trump rally in North Carolina targeted Omar with chants of “send her back”. Amid condemnation (Omar said: “I believe [Trump] is fascist”), Emmer said: “I didn’t watch the rally last night, sorry, but there’s no place for that kind of talk. I don’t agree with it.” Trump – who at the time said himself he was “not happy” with the crowd and claimed to have tried to stop the chants – may now wish to consider that in the same session with reporters, Emmer both said he didn’t think Trump had a “racist bone” in his body, and tried to explain Trump’s attacks on Omar. “What he was trying to say he said wrong,” Emmer said. “What he was trying to say is that if you don’t appreciate this country you don’t have to be here. It has nothing to do with your race or gender, or your family history. It has to do with respecting and loving the country that is giving you the opportunities that you have. “I had somebody say to me recently: ‘You know when Ilhan talks, Ilhan makes it look like she lets people believe she hates America.’ Now I don’t know if that’s true, but as somebody said to me back at home, they said to me: ‘How about a little gratitude with that attitude?’” Sidney Blumenthal’s Guardian column today – on the short-lived candidacy for speaker of Jim Jordan, the end of which precipitated today’s votes and the rise of Tom Emmer – is worth your time, starting from the opening lines about the necessity of counting votes and proceeding through Jordan’s unique political career: Jim Jordan’s march to seize the Capitol began as a beer hall putsch but veered into Sesame Street. Vote after vote, he has missed the sagacity of the Count, the puppet Dracula who teaches children the number of the day. Former speaker Nancy Pelosi wryly remarked that the Republicans should “take a lesson in mathematics and learning how to count”. After the second round, Jordan threw in the towel from his stool in the corner: no más! He endorsed instead extending the tenure and power of Patrick McHenry, the speaker pro tempore, until someone could figure something else out. But Jim Jordan the consensus builder was a short-lived phenomenon. The spirit of violence swirled around him. Steve Scalise, the majority leader, emerges to talk about the talks (and discuss the discussions) going on behind closed doors. Speaking to reporters at the Capitol, Scalise, of Louisiana and a previous candidate for speaker, says of the 20 or more holdouts against Emmer: “There’s some conversations, some are moving.” From the top: “First of all, I want to congratulate Tom Emmer on being selected our speaker designate with strong support. We are working right now through some questions still and we just continue our conversations. “Obviously we want to work to make sure when we get to the floor we have 217 [votes, to make Emmer speaker] and that’s something that Tom has said he wants to do before we go to the floor. So we’re gonna have some more conversations, but this is an ongoing process. We like to wrap this up today, but we’re still talking to some individual members.” Asked about the likelihood of Emmer (from Minnesota) making it to the floor today, Scalise says: “There’s some conversations, some are moving. You got to continue having these conversations. That’s what we’re doing right now.” Emmer, Scalise says, is “hearing everybody in those conversations going on as we speak. So that’s the first thing that Tom’s doing, is hearing people out, and that’s what, frankly, this whole process has been about. And so he’s got to hear people out. Ultimately, work to to move them over. And we’ve got to keep working until we get to 217. And I’m gonna do what I can to help Tom.” Matt Gaetz of Florida, who started this whole mess by prompting the ejection of Kevin McCarthy, then appears and stalks off, followed by the media scrum. Some reading to pass the time while we wait for Tom Emmer to speak – or not – concerning the last person to actually be speaker, Kevin McCarthy, and his relationships with Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the two anti-Trump Republicans who sat on the House January 6 committee and subsequently left Congress, Cheney defeated in Wyoming and Kinzinger retired in Illinois. Kinzinger will next week publish a book: Renegade: Defending Democracy and Liberty in Our Divided Country. Inside, he says McCarthy dismissed Cheney’s warning about January 6 on a party conference call five days before. Kinzinger also details two occasions on which, he says, McCarthy shoulder-checked him, physically, in the House chamber. Those moments, Kinzinger says, made him think: “What a child.’” In a passage written before McCarthy’s historic ejection by Matt Gaetz of Florida, the catalyst for the current mess, Kinzinger adds: “I just chalked it up to the immature behaviour that [McCarthy] favoured and that had become more and more common inside the chamber.” The day so far House Republicans have nominated Tom Emmer to become the next speaker of Congress’s lower chamber, but their long search for leadership is far from over. As many as 26 members of the party signaled they will not vote for him on the floor, more than enough to sink his candidacy. This is the exact same position Steve Scalise and Jim Jordan found themselves in, and highlights just how disunited the GOP has become and what an absolute mess that ouster of Kevin McCarthy created. Emmer has reportedly vowed to continue polling Republicans behind closed doors until he gets the support he needs to win. We’ll see what becomes of that. Here’s a rundown of today’s news so far: Jenna Ellis, a former lawyer to Donald Trump who was indicted in the Georgia election subversion case, accepted a plea deal from prosecutors. Emmer’s detractors cite his stance on same-sex marriage and on government spending bills. Dean Phillips, a Democratic congressman who is mulling challenging Joe Biden in the primary, said he would be willing to vote “present” when Emmer’s nomination is considered in exchange for policy concessions. Tom Emmer is pressing on in the face of the significant GOP opposition to his candidacy for speaker. CNN reports that he wants to continue holding roll call votes behind closed doors until he has the numbers he needs to win. But if he is not successful, congressman David Joyce says he will offer a resolution to give acting speaker Patrick McHenry the full powers of the job. Joyce made the same proposal last week, when Jim Jordan’s candidacy was flailing: Emmer faces substantial opposition in bid for speaker - reports Up to 26 Republicans may oppose Tom Emmer becoming speaker of the House, enough to stop him from getting the gavel, Punchbowl News reports: Assuming all Democrats vote against him, Emmer can only afford to lose four of the 221 Republicans in the House – a goal he appears to be well short of. The nominees who came before him, Steve Scalise and Jim Jordan, faced the same problem, and ultimately had to drop out. House Republicans have not yet announced when they will convene the chamber to hold a floor vote on making Emmer speaker.