They are:
- Rep. Chip Roy, Texas 21st.
- Rep. Keith Self, Texas 3rd.
Click here for the current delegation from Texas to the U.S. House of Representatives.
Here are a couple of stories from the Texas Tribune regarding their decision and the impact it is having on their colleagues. These are followed by one from the NYT describing the ideological nature of the 20 no votes.
- Texas Republicans urge Chip Roy and other McCarthy opponents to let Congress get to work.
Texans are slated to chair some of the most influential committees in this congressional session. But without a speaker of the House, they can’t take their gavels. And it’s getting on their nerves.
“Everything flows from the speaker being elected. We can’t even get sworn in. I can’t start my committee. We’re held hostage until we get this thing resolved,” said Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Austin, who is slated to lead the House Foreign Affairs Committee and lead the party’s investigations into the Biden administration’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.
. . . Normally, committee assignments would be determined by early December, allowing members to hire staff and set up the structures needed to immediately start legislating. Republican party leadership plays a central role in selecting who will lead each committee.
But that process was delayed late last year after it became clear that this year’s speaker’s election would be competitive. The House Republican conference was unable to get enough of their members behind McCarthy in a November party meeting to secure his majority in the full chamber, leaving too much uncertainty for the party to start doling out chairmanships.
That’s put several Texans in limbo. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Houston, is competing against two other Republicans, Reps. Mark Green, R-Tennessee, and Clay Higgins, R-Louisiana, to lead the Homeland Security Committee, which will be key to the party’s oversight agenda of the Biden administration’s immigration policy. Rep. Jodey Arrington, R-Lubbock, is also gunning for the top spot on the House Budget Committee.
“Rules changes, who gets more power, who gets on what committee — I can’t think of one American who gives a damn about any of that,” Crenshaw told reporters. “They care about the mission. And the conservative agenda is one that will accomplish the mission for the American people the best. But we can’t start that agenda until we start governing.”
- U.S. Rep. Chip Roy emerges as key GOP agitator in U.S. House speaker fight.
U.S. Rep. Chip Roy is showing no signs of backing down in his fight to overhaul Congress, even as he’s facing off against the most powerful members of his party to do so.
The boisterous Austin Republican continued to issue impassioned pleas from the House floor Tuesday afternoon urging a shake-up of his party’s leadership and pressing for changes to rules that he says keeps the power of Congress in the hands of a small group of party leaders. Roy’s stand, along with the protests from a vocal group of roughly 20 other right-wing Republicans including two Texans, blocked his party from being able to select a Speaker on Tuesday — the first time in a century the House was unable to select its leader on the first try.
The stalemate is angering other Republicans, who fear it is self-sabotage before the party can even swear in its own members. Without a speaker, rules for the House’s day-to-day business cannot be determined, staffers could go without paychecks and laws cannot be passed. Committee assignments also remain in flux, including a handful of chairmanships that Texans are gunning for. The speaker is the third-highest-ranking elected official in the country, second in line to the presidency. The House will vote again and again until it is able to find one person who can get a simple majority to be speaker.
- How Far Right Are the 20 Republicans Who Voted Against McCarthy?
Most of the lawmakers who voted against Mr. McCarthy — at least 95 percent — are members of the House Freedom Caucus or were recently endorsed by its campaign arm. By contrast, just about a fifth of all House Republicans are estimated to be part of the caucus, founded in 2015 and considered to be one of the farthest-right groups in the House.
In the third round of voting on Tuesday, all 20 of the lawmakers defying Mr. McCarthy voted for Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio instead. Mr. Jordan, who himself voted for Mr. McCarthy, is a founding member of the Freedom Caucus and has repeatedly cast doubt on the 2020 election.
In the fourth, fifth and sixth rounds, held Wednesday, the same 20 lawmakers voted for Representative Byron Donalds of Florida, also a member of the Freedom Caucus, instead of Mr. McCarthy. Mr. Donalds joined the group on the third vote, throwing his support to Mr. Jordan after voting for Mr. McCarthy on the first two ballots, and then for himself in the subsequent ballots.
