If Republicans do manage to keep control of the House of Representatives after the November election, it appears that there could be a challenge to the leadership of House Speaker Paul Ryan.
Yes, here we go again.
At the moment, conservatives who are upset with Ryan don’t have enough votes to get rid of Ryan, but just the fact that they’re making noise about ousting the Speaker proves that his grip on power is shaky.
Conservative House members who spoke to the Huffington Post this week said while they won’t be able to deny Ryan the top spot in the House, denying him a first ballot victory would weaken him and force him to consider rules changes that would allow the far right-wing of the GOP House to push their extremist agenda in 2017.
One member of the conservative Freedom Caucus–which is seeking to send a message to Ryan–noted:
“The only leverage any Republican member of the House has for getting rule changes is the speaker vote.”
Members of the House Freedom Caucus are interested in pushing for four major changes to the current House rules:
- Increasing caucus representation on committees
- Adding hard-liners to subcommittees
- Allowing the House campaign arm to collect contributions from the Freedom Caucus which would be used specifically to support right-wing candidates
- Clarifying rules-suspension votes
If Republicans lose more than 12 seats in the November election, Ryan’s re-election as House Speaker could also be threatened. The GOP holds 247 seats in the current Congress, and 218 votes are needed to win an election as Speaker, presuming all the Republican members vote the way the party wants them to.
Some Freedom Caucus members were shaken by the primary loss by Tim Huelskamp of Kansas, and a few have noted that Ryan wasn’t helpful enough in making sure Huelskamp won the primary. One commented:
“How can you have a gang, and have one in your gang get stabbed, and do nothing? You got to stab somebody, or else what’s the point of having a gang?”
One cannot help but wonder if the Freedom Caucus is planning a symbolic reenactment of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar with Ryan as the doomed emperor.
Featured Image Via Gage Skidmore for Flickr available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License
