Susan Ferrechio
The Washington Examiner
1/7/2015
It wasn’t the Republican votes against House Speaker John Boehner that truly rattled the GOP leadership, it was the phone calls.
There were hundreds of them, jamming the phone lines of the district and Capitol offices of dozens of House GOP lawmakers.
The callers were not angry about legislation. Nor were they asking for help with a local matter. They were demanding their representative vote against Boehner Tuesday in his bid to win election to a third term as speaker.
For the GOP leadership, the flood of calls was a game changer. It thrusted the leadership into triage mode as it scrambled to heal the growing rift among House Republicans.
“We’ve never been lobbied quite like that,” House Rules Committee Chairman Pete Sessions, R-Texas, told the Washington Examiner on Wednesday. “We yesterday began a new era of circumstances, and one is that we have members who are going to solicit the outside in ways that they have not previously.”…
The article continues at The Washington Examiner.
Related: Huelskamp: Many of My Colleagues Feared Retribution if They Voted Against Boehner (video)
Congressman Tim Huelskamp (R-KS) said that “many” of his House colleagues would have voted to unseat House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) if they knew they would not be retaliated against on Thursday’s “Your World with Neil Cavuto” on the Fox News Channel.
“If you are found to be voting against the speaker, you don’t get the chairmanship you thought you were going to get, you don’t get to move up. Your bill doesn’t get heard on the floor…I know from many of my colleagues that if they knew there would not be any revenge or punishment, or intimidation, or retribution from the establishment, they would have voted with their constituents. That’s the thing, constituents wanted change” he stated.
23 Conservative Leaders Warn Boehner Not to Punish GOP Dissenters
…“It is unacceptable and disappointing to see that some conservatives are already being punished by you and your leadership team for disagreements over policy and the direction of the conference. This must end immediately,” the 23 conservatives wrote in a letter from the Conservative Action Project…
Update: Laura Ingraham to GOP: Forget Obama, ‘Do Something for the People’
“I think the concern for many of us looking at the Republican Party is in victory, they act like they lose. ‘Oh, my gosh, we have to move toward Obama!’ Obama is gone, okay? If I were a Republican congressman, I would act on behalf of the American people,” Ingraham admonished as the House faced a vote challenging the re-election of longtime House Speaker John Boehner, and as Obama works to build his legacy with Republicans in control.
