The House will never elect an ex-member as Speaker so the legality or illegality of it will remain academic.
I always thought it was a ridiculous suggestion.
I guess Stockman had the right idea. Pelosi voted for herself again and Boehner didn’t vote so Stockman was the only “present” vote.
If you are going to do a protest why not come up with 1 candidate who is a current member and who is not supporting the Speaker you want removed (Cantor voted for Boehner). All these random votes look silly. GAO Comptroller David Walker? WTF? Walter Jones is mentally ill.
Did you get a load of the DEM protest votes?
McIntyre (scared of 2014) and Lipinski voted for DJ’s Congressman Jim Cooper.
Cooper himself voted for COLIN POWELL!! I bust a gut laughing when I saw that,
Matheson (scared) voted for Dingell
Barrow (scared) voted for his fellow Georgian Lewis.
So that’s 9 GOP votes for someone other than Boehner. 1 present vote and 3 GOP absent including Boehner himself.
5 rat votes against Pelosi and 3 of them absent.
In 1996 4 Republicans voted for Republicans other than Newt and 5 voted present.
I mean 1997.
It shows what a mess congressional Republicans are now. Reduced to nonsense like this.
Last year it was ‘We are going to win easy, America is with us”
Now its :”???? We are mad and confused and mad and don't know what to do. If we cant beat Obama then lets go after Rs symbolically of course”, that is all that is left,
Of course in 2016/2017 Obama moves on and the Dem party will have a vacuum too. He is holding it together now and his successor candidate will probably be white/.
One difference between the protracted coups of 1997 and 2013 was that in 1997 the coup-plotters actually managed to get Newt’s votes below 218 (he was reelected with 216—abstentions and “present” votes lowered the denominator and thus the minimum required) while Boehner got 220 (with 214 required).
Impy, you mentioned “3 GOP absent including Boehner himself,” but I think that there were at least 4 Republican seats that either were vacant or its member didn’t vote. Boehner didn’t vote, Mulvaney and Labrador stayed silent when their names were called, and there was one vacancy: Tim Scott had resigned from the House the prior day (sometime after voting against the tax deal) to accept his appointment to the Senate.