- House Republican leader not elected in six rounds of voting
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Good morning, US politics live blog readers, as we set out on another day of high drama in Washington. Congressional Republicans narrowly won control of the House of Representatives in November’s midterm elections but have failed to agree amongst themselves who to elect as Speaker of the House, after two days of voting rounds where Kevin McCarthy did not get the necessary majority.
Stick with us as we cover today’s developments as they happen. Here is what’s on the political agenda:
The House will go back into session at 12pm ET today and the battle to become Speaker will resume. House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy has now been through six rounds of voting since Tuesday afternoon and failed to win a majority despite the party having control of the chamber. This is unprecedented in at least a century of US politics.
Kevin McCarthy is expected once again to hold frantic meetings this morning prior to the House session. The California Republican is going through an epic political trauma that is not only bad for him but makes the Republicans look useless as civil war rages in the party.
No other House business can begin until the chamber has a speaker. That means lawmakers have not been sworn in for the 118th Congress that began on January 3, including all the brand new representatives elected for the first time in the midterms.
McCarthy is still negotiating, hoping to offer enough concessions to the 19 or 20 rightwing rebels on his own side who refuse to vote for him. With the narrow GOP majority he can only afford to lose four GOP votes if the Democrats all continue turning up and voting for their guy, House minority leader and New York congressman Hakeem Jeffries, who took over the position from former Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Elsewhere, at 11.15am ET, Joe Biden, accompanied by his vice-president Kamala Harris, is due to make remarks on the situation at the US-Mexico border, where confusion and tension about amid the upholding of the public health measure Title 42 that continues to act as a harsh anti-immigration tool and is causing misery for migrants on both sides of the border. Notably, instead of billing the remarks as focusing on humanitarian issues and improving the US’s dysfunctional immigration legal system, the White House has billed the remarks as being about “border security and enforcement.”