House Speaker Candidates Make Their Case to the GOP Transcript

Happening right now, republicans are huddled behind closed doors holding a candidate forum for Speaker of the House. In total nine men, they're all men, have thrown their hat in the ring to take on the role. But after both Congressman Steve Scalise and Jim Jordan failed to secure the 217 votes needed, we're all wondering, can anyone get there? It is very much up in the air and the mood in the Republican Party is pretty tense as a result. (00:25) California Republican congressman Tom McClintock wrote a scathing letter to his eight colleagues that voted to oust former house speaker Kevin McCarthy. He suggested that his, "Wayward colleagues have the wisdom to see the damage they have done to our country and have the courage to set things right before it's too late." And over the weekend, several members of the House GOP did not hesitate to vent their frustrations either.

This is not a time to play games. This is embarrassing for the Republican Party. It's embarrassing for the nation.

Our conference is broken. We owe the American people an apology.

We cannot have an entire branch of government offline.

It's my 10th term in Congress. This is probably one of the most embarrassing things I've seen.

Do you guys have any idea how clownish you look?

Well, you know Jake, I'm very fond of saying that Congress is a like high school, but even more so.

NBC's senior Capitol Hill correspondent Garrett Haake joins me now. Garrett, how is it looking? Of those nine candidates, is there anything like a front-runner yet?

Well, Jacob, at least one of those candidates has decided he's not going to get there. Dan Meuser dropped out about halfway through this candidate forum tonight, so I suppose we've made some progress in the sense that we know one person who won't be the next speaker of the house. (01:44) But look, I think coming into tonight, there were probably two candidates who I'm watching most closely. One of them is Tom Emmer. He's the current whip. That's the number three person in House Republican leadership. He's won leadership elections before. He has a big team. He has people who owe him favors, which are all important things when you go into a leadership election like this. But he also has enemies, and that might be a problem. He's not particularly popular with the Donald Trump wing of the party. (02:08) The other person I'm watching is Byron Donalds, who is popular in that Trump wing of the party. He's relatively new. This is his second term. And he's got, I think, what might be a good combination of charisma and likability within the party, but none of that deep-seated dislike of somebody who's been up here long enough to have hurt some feelings in the course of his career. (02:27) They're probably the two who I'm watching the most closely tonight, but I think that the last three weeks have taught us anything, it's that we don't really know anything until the votes start getting counted on the floor.

Garrett, it's been about, what is it, 20 days without a speaker. And of course, we're at a moment where we need government to perhaps take up war funding on behalf of the Biden administration or keep the government running. But remind us the other kinds of business that this government has to move forward. What is suffering as this fight for speaker goes on?

Well, look, those are probably the two most pressing needs you just outlined. The fact that funding for the entire government runs out in a couple of weeks, Congress has made no progress on addressing that. This funding package that the Biden administration has requested for hotspots around the world, that includes money for Israel, for Ukraine, for Taiwan, and for the US border, none of that money is getting anywhere. (03:21) But there are other programs that are set to expire over the next couple of months, or who have recently expired. Things like some pandemic era childcare programs that could use additional funding. There's making sure that disaster funding is there and available for Americans who need it. I mean, really anything in which federal dollars are doled out is particularly frozen. And the Senate can still confirm ambassadors and judges and all that kind of thing. But anything that requires that chamber behind me to open and get work done is totally frozen, and the work just backs up and backs up and backs up towards the end of the year.

So Garrett, I want to just ask you, what happens next? But in fairness to you, I also want to ask, have we entered a phase that is so detached from precedent that it is impossible to answer that question? Are we beyond knowing what could possibly happen next?

Yeah. Look, I mean, I think we're in a position where knowing the specifics is very hard, although the general contours are going to remain the same. It's such a narrow majority that really only two things can happen. Some Republican is going to shoot the moon here and manage to land the majority in this very narrow place where he, or possibly she if it's not any of these eight men still in it, have the right combination of enough friends, enough frustration, and few enough enemies that they can be elected in a traditional way. (04:41) Or we're going to see something truly unusual which is, if enough dysfunction builds up, perhaps another week or more, you'll see a bipartisan coalition select somebody to be the speaker. That somebody will almost certainly be a Republican. But they'll be running the show with some democratic votes, and that would be truly unprecedented in this body, Jake.

NBC's Garrett Haake on the shoot the moon beat for us. Garrett, thank you so much.

You bet.

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