Nine Republicans vie to be speaker candidate as House paralysis enters third week – US politics live

Ronny Jackson, a former White House physician to Barack Obama and Donald Trump who is now a Republican congressman, endorsed Byron Donald’s candidacy for speaker.

Here’s the Texas lawmaker’s announcement:

Speaker candidate Kevin Hern is the chair of the Republican Study Committee, the largest ideological caucus in the House, which is geared towards advancing conservative policy goals.

Below is the “Dear Colleague” letter he sent out to announce his candidacy for the chamber’s top job. The Oklahoman is also a former McDonald’s franchise owner, and sent the letter to Republican lawmakers along with the chain’s signature burgers:

While the Senate’s top Republican Mitch McConnell is partial to Joe Biden’s request for a joint Ukraine-Israel aid package, speaker candidate Dan Meuser told CNN he opposes it.

He’s just one man, and faces a crowded field of eight others to win the gavel, but is unlikely to be alone in his views. Here’s what he had to say:

There are three members of the Freedom Caucus in the race for House speaker: Gary Palmer, Mike Johnson and Byron Donalds, a Donald Trump ally who would make history as the first Black speaker.

But winning the gavel will require the back of at least some of the moderate Republicans who turned their backs on the similarly conservative Jim Jordan last week, and there’s no saying if Donalds would be successful.

In an interview with rightwing network Newsmax this weekend, Donalds tried to cast himself as a uniter of the party’s various wings. Here’s what he had to say:

Rightwing House Freedom Caucus demands lawmakers stay in Washington DC until speaker elected

On the topic of Donald Trump’s campaign to overturn the 2020 election, the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports that his defense against federal charges related to trying to stop Joe Biden from entering the White House may have just taken a hit from a co-defendant’s guilty plea in a separate case in Georgia:

Donald Trump’s chances of being convicted in the federal 2020 election subversion case may have increased after his top election lawyer took a plea deal in the 2020 election case in Fulton county and admitted to a felony that the effort to create fake slates of electors was fraudulent.

The immediate consequence of Kenneth Chesebro’s plea deal is that he could incriminate the former president in Georgia, given one of his plea conditions involved testifying truthfully against other defendants.

But Chesebro could also separately incriminate Trump in the federal criminal case in Washington, should the special counsel Jack Smith use his new admission as evidence that Trump conspired to defraud the United States in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

From Punchbowl News, here is a graph that looks at how the nine Republican candidates for speaker voted on some of the biggest questions that recently came before the chamber.

These include certifying the 2020 election, last year’s Respect for Marriage Act, which protects same-sex marriage rights, and aid for Ukraine. There are a few takeaways from this chart, but one of the biggest ones is that all but two of the speaker candidates supported Donald Trump’s baseless fraud claims about the 2020 election:

Shifting back to the chaos in the House of Representatives, remember that the man in the middle of all this is Patrick McHenry.

He’s the current speaker pro tempore, an acting position that McHenry has said he has no interest in advancing from. But with the GOP conference deeply divided over who to elect speaker, some lawmakers have openly proposed giving him the position’s full powers.

That idea may get more traction in the days to come, if none of the nine declared candidates for the post attract majority support. From Friday, here’s McHenry elaborating on the party’s schedule for this week:

Speaking of Israel, it has yet to begin its threatened ground invasion of Gaza, while the enclave’s health ministry says more than 5,000 people have been killed in airstrikes since 7 October.

We have a live blog covering the latest on this story, and you can find it here:

You don’t hear too much about the Senate these days, probably because it’s been quietly doing the little that it can while the House muddles through a historic bout of dysfunction. But there was some important news out of Congress’s upper chamber over the weekend, when its top Republican Mitch McConnell signaled he was OK with Joe Biden’s request for a joint Israel-Ukraine aid package. The measure could still be blocked in the House, but it was nonetheless a positive development for the White House’s foreign policy push. Here’s the Guardian’s Sam Levine with more:

Mitch McConnell offered a strong endorsement on Sunday of the Joe Biden White House’s $106bn aid proposal to Israel and Ukraine, saying he and the president were essentially “in the same place” on the issue.

McConnell, the powerful Republican leader in the Senate, also rebuffed some of his GOP colleagues in the Senate who have called for a package separating assistance for the two countries, saying it would be “a mistake” during an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation.

The Republican leader offered significant backing to the White House’s $106bn request, including $14bn in assistance to Israel, $60bn in aid to Ukraine and another $14bn to improve security on the US Mexico border. An additional $10bn would be allocated to humanitarian relief as well as an additional $7bn to the Indio-Pacific region.

Nine Republican senators wrote a letter to McConnell on Thursday saying that Ukraine and Israel aid should not be paired together. “These are two separate conflicts and it would be wrong to leverage support of aid to Israel in an attempt to get additional aid for Ukraine across the finish line,” the group wrote.

McConnell rejected that view on Sunday.

Here’s the Guardian’s Sam Levine with a rundown of what we know about the nine Republicans who have announced their candidacy in the perilous race for House speaker:

After more than two weeks of failing to choose a speaker, Republicans in the US House plan to reconvene on Monday to begin the process of nominating a third candidate to try to get the 217 votes needed to secure the speakership.

So far, Steve Scalise, the No 2 Republican in the House, and Jim Jordan, the far-right congressman, have both failed in their bids.

Here’s a look at the nine candidates who signed up to run ahead of a noon deadline Sunday.

The nine House Republicans who want to be speaker

House paralysis enters week three as nine Republicans emerge to fight for speaker