Was there a last minute effort to unseat John Boehner as Speaker?
The Hill thinks so. The NYT makes the same point. It was unorganized, but real. Boehner has been upsetting conservative Republicans for some time, and his support for the fiscal cliff compromise seems to have pushed them over the edge.
A group of dissident Republicans failed on Thursday to push Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) to a second ballot in his election as Speaker and potentially replace him as leader of the House.
Twelve House Republicans broke from Boehner in a tense public roll-call vote, either by voting for someone else or deliberately not voting at all — five short of what would have been needed to force a second ballot.
There hasn't been a need for a second ballot in 90 years. Conservatives have been punished by Boehner and the Republican leadership by being removed from their preferred committees (remember that this is a key source of power for party leaders).
One of the 12 Republican defectors, Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.), said it was Rep. Justin Amash, a Michigan Republican just elected to his second term, who tried in recent days to organize what amounted to an attempted coup. Amash and Jones were among the four Republicans kicked off their committees by GOP leaders after the November elections.
At one point, both Jones and Amash said, the group had amassed enough Republicans to deny Boehner the gavel on the first ballot. Boehner ended up receiving 220 votes out of 426 votes cast on the floor, or 51.6 percent. The Speaker must receive a clear majority of votes cast, meaning he needed at least 214.
“We thought we had 20,” Jones said. “In fairness to those, two or three of those just decided they couldn’t go through with it.”
NPR details the vote process. It was long and drawn out, and uncertain to go Boehner's way at first.
You can see the gaveling of the 113th Congress here:
