House speaker election: Paul Ryan enters the race

In an impressive demonstration of Republican unity, the House of Representatives elected Paul Ryan to be its next speaker Thursday morning by a comfortable margin.

Ryan easily surpassed the majority of votes cast overall that he needed to become speaker, and even picked up the support of many of the most conservative members of the House; 236 of the 245 Republicans present and voting backed his candidacy. Meanwhile, 184 of the 187 Democrats present voted for Nancy Pelosi.

Rep. Paul Ryan announced Thursday night that he will run to succeed John Boehner as speaker of the House — and he’s the overwhelming favorite to win.

“I pledged to you that if I could be a unifying figure, then I would serve,” Ryan wrote in a letter to his House Republican colleagues. “After talking with so many of you, and hearing your words of encouragement, I believe we are ready to move forward as a one, united team. And I am ready and eager to be our speaker.”

Paul Ryan says he’ll only accept the speakership of the House if it doesn’t cut into family time. This should be met with cheers by anyone who wants to normalize the idea of men being active in family life. Instead, he’s faced a backlash — led not only be conservatives, but by liberals and feminists who presumably want more men to follow his lead.

On the right, the objection is predictable: Paul Ryan needs to man up and do his job. Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-KS), a conservative Ryan critic, told Fox News’s Chad Pergram: “I’ve never heard of someone who wanted more power and less responsibility.”

After a difficult five-year tenure as speaker of the House, John Boehner has announced his plans to step down. Yet Republicans are having difficulty coming up with someone who wants to replace him. If you want to understand why, how about trying your hand at his job?

Kevin McCarthy’s decision to step aside in the race for the speakership was an absolute bombshell. Though his announcement was surprising, McCarthy’s predicament was obvious: While he almost certainly had a majority of Republican votes for yesterday’s (now postponed) vote, he couldn’t count on garnering the required 218 votes for the actual speaker election.

The announcement exploded so loudly Thursday that John Boehner’s attempt to calm the masses has barely been heard. As Roll Call reported:

Since the GOP took over the House five years ago, the chamber has lurched from crisis to crisis. Hardball tactics demanded by conservatives brought the country within days of defaulting on its debt in 2011, and shut down the federal government for 16 days in 2013. Last month, Speaker John Boehner announced his resignation. And now Kevin McCarthy has shockingly dropped out of the race to succeed him.

Overall, the House GOP is a dysfunctional mess — far more than its counterpart in the Senate. And one big reason why is the method by which the House elects its speaker. Most leadership posts in Congress are partisan ones and are determined by party members only, behind closed doors.

House Republicans need a speaker. Their current speaker is quitting. The obvious next choice just dropped out of the race. The other obvious choice is telling anyone who’ll listen that he won’t run. And a bipartisan speaker just isn’t going to happen.

House Republicans need Mitt Romney.

House Republicans need someone capable of leading them out of the carnage of the bloody civil war between the Tea Party–fueled revolutionaries and an establishment seen as too willing to compromise on conservative principles in the name of governing.

The answer is clear: Paul Ryan should be the next speaker of the House.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) threw the House of Representatives into chaos on Thursday when he announced that he was dropping out of the race for speaker. It was a shocking development because it was widely believed that McCarthy’s election to replace outgoing Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) was almost inevitable. No serious candidates had stepped forward to challenge McCarthy for the post, and many people, including Vox’s Jon Allen, expected the real fight to be over who would replace McCarthy in the No. 2 spot.

McCarthy’s decision leaves a huge power vacuum in the House of Representatives.

God, it sucks to be the Republican speaker of the House.

It should be one of the best jobs in Washington — vested with power, prestige, and the good feeling that comes with running the federal body closest to the people. Instead, it’s a fool’s errand.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) is planning to challenge Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy in the race to succeed exiting House Speaker John Boehner, Politico’s Rachael Bade and John Bresnahan report.

Chaffetz, who’s in just his fourth term in Congress, is best-known for his investigations of a series of scandals involving the US Secret Service. Conservative, telegenic, and well-liked, he chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and has never served in House leadership before. But his name made the news lately after an inspector general’s report found that dozens of Secret Service officials improperly snooped on his personal records while he was investigating the agency.

Republicans in the House of Representatives are locked in a long, grinding civil war. The rebels will never win power, but the establishment can’t fully annihilate them either.

The rebels have organized themselves into the House Freedom Caucus, a group that successfully pressured Speaker John Boehner to give up his gavel. But the group doesn’t have the numbers to elevate one of its own to a top position when Republicans choose new leaders on October 8.

Since the 2010 elections, Republican control of the House of Representatives has been the biggest obstacle for progressives trying to pass new laws. Democrats have longed to retake the chamber, and with historically low congressional approval and bad Republican favorability ratings, some now hope that their party’s 2016 presidential nominee will be able sweep them back into control.

But it doesn’t look likely that the GOP House will go away anytime soon. Democrats currently need to pick up 30 seats to retake the House, and there’s little historical precedent for such a wave helping out the president’s party. Indeed, no incumbent president’s party has managed to achieve such gains since Lyndon Johnson’s historic 1964 landslide.