HOUSE speaker Nancy Pelosi could be out within days, as a growing numbers of Democrats look set to vote against her.
Members of the House will vote when they convene for the first time in the new year on January 3 – but the leader of the GOP warned the odds looked stacked against Pelosi.
Republican leader Kevin McCarthy pointed out that”during the last vote, 15 Democrats voted against Pelosi for Speaker” in a tweet on Tuesday night.
“And 10 of them are coming back – and if they vote against her again Pelosi will be ousted as Speaker of the House,” he continued, posting an interview with Fox News.
In the interview McCarthy warned: “She is holding on by a thread.”
Pelosi, the only ever woman to serve as Speaker of the House, announced in November that she was seeking her fourth two-year term in the position.
It comes after certain Democrats refused to reveal if they would support her bid to be re-elected.
Representative-elects Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman – both progressives newly elected to Congress in November – deflected questioning on CNN’s “State of the Union” about whether they would vote for Pelosi.
“What I’m going to do is make sure that the voices of the people of St. Louis are heard and that we have what we need. And so you will find out then,” Bush told CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday on “State of the Union.”
And when asked the same question Bowman side stepped, saying, “You will find out when my vote is tallied and, again, organizing with our community to figure out what’s best.”
And New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the media-savvy self-proclaimed Democratic socialist, suggested earlier this month she would not support Pelosi if the speaker ran again.
She claimed it was time for new, more progressive leadership for the Democratic Party.
The 31-year-old New York representative, however, admitted at the time that even if Pelosi, 80, and Schumer, 70, were to go, the progressive wing of the party had no plan on who would fill the vacancies.
Pelosi is working with a narrower Democratic majority in light of the party’s losses in the November election.
Covid-19 poses an additional hurdle for Pelosi because members must physically be on the House floor for the vote, and cannot do so remotely as was allowed during the pandemic.
Pelosi cannot lose as many Democratic votes as she did in 2018, and in the worst case scenario for the party, the House could wind up with a Republican speaker, The Hill reported on Saturday.
