House Republicans meet behind closed doors to select speaker nominee – US politics live | US politics

Several former Ohio State University wrestlers are voicing their opposition towards Republican representative Jim Jordan’s speaker candidacy.

The former students have accused Jordan of ignoring sexual abuse and failing to protect them from a sexual predator while he was the team’s assistant coach.

One wrestler, Mike Schyck, said: “Do you really want a guy in that job who chose not to stand up for his guys? Is that the kind of character trait you want for a House speaker?”

Another former wrestler, Dunyasha Yetts, told NBC, “He doesn’t deserve to be House speaker. He still has to answer for what happened to us.”

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Republican representative Steve Scalise said his first order of business, if elected as House speaker, is to “bring a strong resolution expressing support for Israel”.

Prior to heading to the closed-door nomination meeting, Scalise told reporters:

“The first order of business under speaker Steve Scalise is going to be bringing a strong resolution expressing support for Israel. We’ve got a very bipartisan bill … ready to go right away to express our support for Israel.

House officials have placed their cellphones into yellow envelopes prior to entering the room in which they will decide who the next House speaker will be.

Washington Post reporter Leigh Ann Caldwell tweeted that a group of New York pro-Kevin McCarthy Republicans were among the last to enter the meeting.

The group “had been discussing if their small [bloc] would block anyone from being speaker. ‘You only need four,’ one said,” tweeted Caldwell.

As Republicans race to find a speaker to fill the seat that has been left vacant by Kevin McCarthy, many names being thrown into the ring, including those involved in election denials.

The Guardian’s Sam Levine reports:

The speakership battle underscores how Republicans who full-throatedly embraced election denialism continue to have access to positions of power.

It also serves as a startling example of how a small minority of members are able to wield considerable power in a congressional system with few competitive races and little incentive to work within the party structure.

The two leading candidates to be the next speaker, Steve Scalise of Louisiana and Jim Jordan of Ohio, tried to overturn the 2020 election. Both voted against certifying the electoral college vote and signed on to a Texas-led lawsuit at the supreme court to try and get the vote thrown out.

Jordan, a prolific spreader of election misinformation, was a key Trump ally before and after the attack on the US Capitol who refused to cooperate with the panel that investigated January 6.

Meanwhile, months after January 6, Scalise still refused to say the election was not stolen.

If either of them were to become speaker, it would place someone who openly sought to overturn the election in one of the most powerful offices in Washington.

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The New Hampshire presidential primary filing period started Wednesday, with the first candidate to register criticizing President Joe Biden and paying a chunk of his filing fee in $2 bills, the Associated Press reports.

The filing is a ritual unruffled by either a changing of the guard or changes to the nominating calendar elsewhere.

For the first time in more than four decades, candidates will file paperwork with a new secretary of state thanks to the retirement last year of longtime elections chief Bill Gardner. But his successor, David Scanlan, is carrying on the tradition of ensuring New Hampshire remains first, waiting for the dust to settle in other states before scheduling the 2024 contest.

In contrast, the candidates themselves – particularly the long shots – often are in a race to sign up first in hopes that a bit of media attention will boost their campaigns. In 1991, a writer from New York drove 11 hours in a snowstorm only to find another perennial candidate waiting at the door. In 2007, a Minnesota fugitive living in Italy sent a package by courier that arrived just before an ex-convict embarked on a 90-minute rant that included five costume changes.

This year, the first to sign up was Mark Stewart Greenstein, who arrived at the Statehouse at 6.30am and paid his $1,000 filing fee in cash, including $400 in $2 bills. Greenstein, a Democrat from West Hartford, Connecticut, said he plans to be on the ballot in five states.

“This is a choice for no Joe Biden,” he said before entering the statehouse to file. “There should be a way for Democrats to express that they don’t like their frontrunner. I’m not his replacement, I’m not going to be around next November. But you can say as a voter, ‘I’m a voter who is dissatisfied.’”

The candidates have until 27 October to sign up, and dozens are expected to do so in part because it’s relatively cheap and easy. They need only meet the basic requirements to be president, fill out a one-page form and pay the filing fee.

New Hampshire, with its state law requiring its primaries to be held first, is defying the Democratic National Committee’s new primary calendar which calls for South Carolina to kick off voting on 3 February, followed by New Hampshire and Nevada. The shakeup came at the request of President Joe Biden in a bid to empower Black and other minority voters crucial to the party’s base.

The full US House of Representatives is due to convene at 3pm ET and it is far from certain that Republicans currently meeting behind closed doors to try to decide on their own nominee for speaker will have coalesced around a candidate by then.

But if/when they have and that name is brought to the floor to begin the full vote for the speakership, House Democrats aren’t planning to vote for the GOP’s choice of either Steve Scalise or Jim Jordan, of course; they plan to nominate their own person – House minority leader and New York congressman Hakeem Jeffries – for speaker. Dems don’t have the votes to elect Jeffries to become speaker but they’ll be eager to show unity in contrast to the Republicans who are in disarray.

There’s talk of a speaker perhaps being elected to take the gavel today (minor miracle) or tomorrow (GOP hopes) but it could take longer if the GOP conference remains so sharply divided and with only a tiny handful of votes within their thin House majority to spare.

Capitol Hill is going to be abuzz on Wednesday as House Republicans strive to overcome deep divisions in their own conference and pick a nominee for speaker.

They will then, at some point, try to get that candidate voted in by a majority of the full House and awarded the gavel, so that Congress can resume normal business.

This is the first day the House convenes officially since a hard-right faction of Republicans engineered the ousting of speaker Kevin McCarthy a week ago. The core legislative business of the House is at a halt, with a temporary speaker in place. Other important functions such as being able to pass resolutions to express lawmakers’ positions in the Israel-Hamas war are at a standstill since the House was placed on recess immediately after McCarthy was axed last Wednesday.

But while this plays out in the lower chamber of Congress today (the Senate is out), readers who also want to keep up with other major topics simply need to turn to the Guardian’s global team of journalists.

We have full coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict that exploded on Saturday with Hamas rockets and fighters roaring out of Gaza to target Israelis in the nearby southern region of the country. But we also have a global live blog running around the clock on the issue. The war is only escalating amid a horrifying death toll of Israelis and Palestinians (and a small but significant number of foreign nationals/dual citizens) and the holding of Israeli and international hostages in Gaza by Hamas militants. That blog is here.

Ukraine’s counteroffensive against the Russian invasion that began 20 months ago continues, with future funding from the US on a knife-edge amid divisions in the House amid Republicans and between Republicans and Democrats. We have a global live blog on the war in Ukraine here.

And the Guardian just days ago launched a dedicated European edition online, our fifth online edition to accompany the US, UK, International and Australian editions. That’s here.

Republicans gather to thrash out choice for new House speaker

Divided House Republicans meet to battle over new speaker