Representative Tom McClintock (R., Calif.), a longtime conservative critic of House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio), will not join the last-minute rebellion against Boehner’s leadership.
McClintock’s ideological allies have been urging him since the lame-duck session to vote against Boehner for speaker, but McClintock maintains that these fights need to take place during the November leadership elections that take place after the midterms.
“It should have been picked in November and it wasn’t,” McClintock told National Review Online. By taking the fight to the House floor, McClintock says, the conservative opponents of Boehner risk letting House Democrats have a voice in who runs the House. Boehner’s critics think that the Republican conference could keep voting until they pick a leader who could get 218 Republican votes.
McClintock disagrees. “The far more likely scenario is that 218 people cannot agree on a speaker,” he said. Having shattered the precedent that the House Republicans are bound by the decision of the House conference on this issue, that then gives license to 29 of the most morally flexible members of the conference to go to Nancy Pelosi and say, ‘hey, let’s work a deal for a truly bipartisan, post-partisan House.’”
The California lawmaker said that his state’s assembly went through just such a fight in 1994. “The strategy that they are pursung is much more likely to result in a more liberal speaker not a more conservative speaker,” he said.