(ReclaimingAmerica.net) – Three Republican US House of Representatives members from the Freedom Caucus have told GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy that they wouldn’t care if the Democrats retain the speakership, according to a report.
On Tuesday, the top House Republican, McCarthy, failed to become the new Speaker of the House of Representatives after three rounds of voting.
McCarthy won 203 votes in the first two ballots and 202 in the third, with 218 votes needed to clinch the speakership.
The GOP has a majority of 222 representatives in the newly convened House. However, in the final vote of the day, 19 Republicans voted to elect Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio as House Speaker even though Jordan himself had endorsed McCarthy.
Even before Tuesday’s vote, however, on Monday, three members of the House Freedom Caucus personally told McCarthy they wouldn’t mind if the Democrats retained the Speaker job.
For the past four years, the speakership was held by California Democrat Nancy Pelosi, who has passed the House Democrat leadership to New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries.
The three Republicans and Freedom Caucus members who told McCarthy they didn’t mind Jeffries for Speaker were Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, and Lauren Boebert of Colorado.
Gaetz, Perry, and Boebert also told the top House Republican that in the new US Congress, they would like to set up their own legal entity, which would wage lawsuits, according to a report by Punchbowl News cited by Breitbart.
The three Freedom Caucus members allegedly stated that if the Speaker’s vote goes to plurality and Jeffries gets elected with the 213 Democrat votes in the new House, they would still “fight him.”
The report claimed McCarthy asked the Freedom Caucus members to take their offer to the entire Republican House Conference. He wanted that to happen in a closed meeting on Tuesday morning.
“If McCarthy made such a request, it may have been his way of taking his fight with the Freedom Caucus — which has been brewing for over a decade — to them by making it happen in front of the whole conference,” Breitbart News commented.
The House Freedom Caucus reportedly demanded specific committee assignments, subcommittee chairs, and “amnesty” in exchange for their potential support for McCarthy’s election.
As he was headed to the House Republican Conference meeting, McCarthy told Punchbowl News he was seeking to “unite the team” of the GOP.
“The difficult part here is we went out to the American public with a commitment to America to fight for them, not for a few members here to fight for their own personal. This is about the country, and we’ll have to show the difference,” McCarthy stated.
