Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives chose Tom Emmer as their nominee for speaker on Tuesday (October 24) but ran into the same internal divisions that have paralyzed the leaderless chamber for three weeks. “We are again, back to where we started,” Representative Troy Nehls told reporters during a break from a closed-door conference meeting.
Emmer, who serves as the No. 3 Republican in the House, secured the nomination after five rounds of voting but appeared to be at least 20 votes short of the 217 he would need to win the speaker’s gavel, lawmakers said.
The party’s fourth pick for the job now finds himself in the same precarious spot that doomed the previous three candidates: seeking to win over a small group of holdouts from his own party that would have the power to doom his prospects.
“I strongly support Tom. We are working right now through questions still, and we’re just going to continue to have a conversation obviously, we want to work to make sure that when we get to the floor we have 217 and that’s something that Tom has said he wants to do before we go to the floor, so we’re going to have some more conversations, but this is an ongoing process,” Representative Steve Scalise told reporters on Tuesday.
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