Posted on 01/07/2015 8:11:41 AM PST by SeekAndFind
“For Pelosi to win almost 20 GOPers would have had to vote for her, and that was not going to happen.”
The correct requirement is a majority of the votes cast, not whether they are for a person or not.A vote cast for "Present" is still a vote cast.
Since there were 408 votes cast, the majority threshold remains at 205.
Well, it’s well and nice fthat you hold that opinion, but it is still wrong. Here’s the full historical analysis from the Congressional Research Service: for every Speaker election from 1789 to 2013: http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/202873.pdf
Man, oh man. I had heard Mulvaney speak twice and came away both times with the feeling that he had a future in conservative politics. I can’t imagine what is going on in the background, but the list of “conservatives” who voted for Boehner reads like a “Who’s who” of people who I thought were solid conservatives. It’s just a shame.
If this guy was telling the truth he would have organized all theses other measures he complained about there not being instead of sitting on its butt and doing nothing but voting for Failure again.
He has no right to call himself conservative after what he did and apparently didn’t do why should we believe his intent.
The table does not take into account the number of vacancies existing in the House at the time of the election; it therefore cannot show whether or not any Speaker may have been elected lacking a majority of the then qualified membership of the House.2 If no candidate obtains the requisite majority, the roll call is repeated.
The precedent has always been a majority of those present who are qualified. Thus, the four instances cited cannot be shown to have resulted in a the election of a Speaker where those voting present affected the outcome.
Thus the number of those voting present has always been so small as to be insignificant, and no way were 40 people going to vote present.
The precedent is clear, from your source on page one, that the Speaker is elected upon reaching a majority of those present and voting.
“The precedent has always been a majority of those present who are qualified.”
How do I know that Gingrich was elected by less than a “majority of those present who are qualified”? Because I’ve seen the vote tally for the Speaker election held on January 7, 1997, in which Gingrich was elected with only 216 votes. Here it is: http://edition.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1997/01/07/gingrich.vote/vote.html
Apart from 216 votes for Gingrich, there were 205 votes for Gephardt and 4 votes for other persons, and 6 members voted “Present,” which adds up to 431. That means that, for Gingrich’s 216 to be a “majority of those present who are qualified,” then none of the other four House members—and there were four others, as there were no vacancies at the time—could have been present in the House that day. Well, Frank Tejeda almost certainly was too ill to attend (he died three weeks later), and it is possible that Julia Carson and Sam Johnson were absent that day (frankly, I don’t know if that was the case), but there definitely was at least one additional Representative present and qualified to vote in the House that day. I know this, because he was on camera almost constantly, and gave a speech right after the vote. His name? Newt Gingrich.
So, Newt Gingrich did not receive the vote of a “majority of those present who are qualified,” and nobody in Congress—not the 206 Democrats, not the 9 or 10 Republicans that refused to vote for Gingrich—raised an objection. Do you still think that “[t]he precedent has always been a majority of those present who are qualified”? More to the point, if there was *any doubt* regarding whether Gingrich merely needed to receive votes from a majority of members voting for a person, or whether he needed to meet the requirements that you (and others, by the way) believed to be applicable, don’t you think that Gingrich would have just voted for himself and thus received a majority of votes from members present and qualified to vote? The fact that Gingrich didn’t vote when his name was called a second time, and thus ended up with 216 votes, speaks more as to what the precedent is than anything that the Congressional Research Service could have found.
So, in sum, the precedent is the one that the Congressional Research Service described, not the one that you and many others assumed.
“Thus the number of those voting present has always been so small as to be insignificant, and no way were 40 people going to vote present.”
“The precedent is clear, from your source on page one, that the Speaker is elected upon reaching a majority of those present and voting.”
I quoted your own sources.
Don’t believe it if you don’t want to.
As for Gingrich, 216 out of 431 people present is still a majority of the votes cast, isn’t it. (431/2 = 215.5.)
You are as stubborn are you are stupid. My apologies for sending you a text that apparently you can’t understand.
Oh, and there were 432 members present, unless you think that Gingrich wasn’t there.
Well, you know what they say about arguing with a fool.
So, you win.
Now tell me, when are you going to go back in time and yank old Newtie right out of that Speaker’s chair, hmmm?
Mick Mulvaney would do well to look into Boehner’s own organized and highly successful COUP against SOH in 1996-97 he pulled off with Bill Paxon and others to give the GOP-E full control of the party. Can Mick Mulvaney stammer around and explain that one to us? In short his excuse is Lame and full of mud.
Again, only if your understanding of the Speaker election requirement was correct would Gingrich have fallen short of a majority. But since all he needed was a majority of those that cast a vote for a person )and didn’t vote present or abstain), his 216 votes were enough with 3 votes to spare.
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