Free Republic

It wasn’t the Republican votes against House Speaker John Boehner that truly rattled the GOP leadership, it was the phone calls. There were hundreds of them, jamming the phone lines of the district and Capitol offices of dozens of House GOP lawmakers. The callers were not angry about legislation. Nor were they asking for help with a local matter. They were demanding their representative vote against Boehner Tuesday in his bid to win election to a third term as speaker. For the GOP leadership, the flood of calls was a game changer. It thrusted the leadership into triage mode as...

Newly elected Representative Alex Mooney (R-WV) demonstrated with his vote in favor of re-electing John Boehner as Speaker of the House on Tuesday that he is a master of the political art of word-parsing and rationalization, especially when it comes to advancing his own ambitions. On December 9, 2013, when the opportunistic former Chairman of the Maryland GOP was considered a long-shot candidacy to win the Republican primary in West Virginia’s 2nd Congressional District, he signed the Madison Project Candidate Pledge. Part of that says: “I pledge to vote against the current leadership when the first reasonable opportunity presents itself....

Around 10 a.m. this morning, Representative John Fleming (R., Md.) received a phone call from a colleague asking him to vote against Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) on the House floor today. Fleming has a longstanding alliance with Representative Steve King (R., Iowa), Representative Jim Bridenstine (R., Okla.), and other ringleaders of the unsuccessful effort to oust Boehner from the speaker’s chair, which makes it surprising that this was the first time anyone had contacted him about the issue. “To ask me to vote against the speaker on the last day like this, without having an alternative to vote for,...

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John Boehner is getting revenge. He secured his third term as speaker Tuesday afternoon, losing 25 votes on the House floor to three relatively unknown members of the House Republican Conference. But he’s already punishing those who betrayed him. First up: Florida Reps. Daniel Webster and Richard Nugent. The pair will be booted from their spots on the House Rules Committee, according to sources familiar with the decision. Webster ran against Boehner (R-Ohio) for speaker Tuesday, and Nugent supported his fellow Floridian. The Rules Committee is a panel appointed by the speaker, and it controls the flow of legislation to...