House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., has withdrawn from the House speaker race after he failed to unite the Republican conference around his candidacy.
The next steps forward for the House are uncertain, but one thing is clear: the chaos that began with the ouster of Kevin McCarthy as speaker last week continues unabated.
“I just shared with my colleagues that I’m withdrawing my name as a candidate for the speaker-designee,” the Louisiana Republican told reporters on Thursday night, just one day after he narrowly won the support of his conference over Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and former President Donald Trump’s pick to serve as speaker.
But as the hours wore on, it became clearer and clearer that Scalise could not win over his detractors. At least 19 House Republicans had opposed his candidacy as of Thursday evening, according to a Spectrum News tally.
“Our conference still has to come together and is not there,” he added. “There are still some people that have their own agendas, and I was very clear we have to have everybody put their agendas on the side and focus on what this country needs.”
The withdrawal leaves the House of Representatives once again leaderless and paralyzed to take action on several key priorities, including providing funding to Israel and other critical partners amid its war with Hamas. It also comes with a little more than a month to go until yet another government shutdown deadline, which Congress only narrowly avoided at the end of last month.
“This House of Representatives needs a speaker and we need to open up the house again,” Scalise said. “But clearly, not everybody is there. And there are still schisms, that has to get resolved.”
Scalise has been the No. 2-ranking House Republican since 2019 and part of Republican House leadership since 2014. The Louisiana Republican, who turned 58 last week, was nearly killed in 2017 when a left-wing extremist opened fire on lawmakers during a practice for the annual congressional baseball game, wounding Scalise and three others.
Scalise only recently returned to Congress after he was diagnosed with blood cancer earlier this year.
“I’ve had big challenges in my life,” he said Thursday. “I’ve been tested in ways that really put perspective on life, really the 2017 shooting when I didn’t know if I was going to make it out alive, taught me what’s important in life, and that’s my family, my faith, and I’m blessed beyond belief. I have absolutely all the right perspective.”
“I still have a deep, deep passion for making sure we get our country back on track and get our conference fixed again,” he continued. “But there’s some folks that really need to look in the mirror over the next couple of days and decide, are we going to get it back on track? Are they going to try to pursue their own agenda? You can’t do both.”
Republicans will meet once again on Friday morning to try and chart a path forward, but it’s once again unclear what that looks like.
“We’re gonna come together as a conference and figure this all out,” Jordan said, adding that he believes “we will come together behind a candidate and then we will move forward for the good of the country.”
Several Republicans refused to back Scalise after Wednesday’s vote, pledging to back Jordan on the House floor when it came to a vote.
“I’ve been very vocal about this over the last couple of days: I personally cannot, in good conscience, vote for someone who attended a white supremacist conference and compared himself to David Duke,” South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace, a Jordan supporter who voted to oust McCarthy last week, said on CNN on Wednesday. “I would be doing an enormous disservice to the voters that I represent in South Carolina if I were to do that.”
“Especially given what’s happening in Israel right now, I just cannot support someone who’s associated with anything that divisive, whether it’s race or religion,” she said. “I’m just a hard pass on that.”
Far-right Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene expressed concerns about Scalise’s health in a social media post: “I like Steve Scalise, and I like him so much that I want to see him defeat cancer more than sacrifice his health in the most difficult position in Congress.”
Former President Trump, who endorsed Jordan while also flirting with the idea of being speaker himself, expressed a similar sentiment.
“I like Steve, I like both of [the speaker candidates] very much,” Trump said on Fox News host Brian Kilmeade’s radio show. “But the problem … Steve is a man that is in serious trouble from the standpoint of his cancer. I mean, he’s got to get better.”
“This is tremendous stress, all of the things that you hear about, and you know, things that you don’t want to get involved in from the standpoint of getting well,” Trump continued. “He was going through very, very serious cancer therapy. He’s got a very serious form of cancer, and … most importantly, I want Steve to get well. I just don’t know how you can do the job when you have such a serious problem.”
Republicans huddled in closed-door meetings on Thursday, but lawmakers said it had become clear that Scalise did not win over any of the holdouts.
“It wasn’t productive,” Ohio Rep. Max Miller told Spectrum News of Thursday’s meeting. “I think [Scalise] actually lost a lot more support this morning than gained, and I think we’re going to have to turn to somebody else.”
Republicans, Miller said, “started leaving [the meeting] room when the speaker-designate was speaking by the droves.”
Miller, who told Spectrum News on Wednesday that he’s a Jordan supporter, said Thursday that his fellow Ohio Republican Jordan would have already been elected speaker.
“I think [Scalise] lost a lot of support,” Miller said, adding: “Steve’s a great man. He’s an American hero and a great patriot, he’s just not the right leader for our conference right now, and I am not the only one who thinks that.“
Democrats are set to oppose the Republican nominee – whoever it ends up being – and remain unified to back House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., as they did in January during the 15 rounds of voting needed to elect McCarthy. That means that Republicans will have to unite around one candidate – or try and work with Democrats on a consensus candidate.
