Who is Steve Scalise, the Republican nominee to be next House Speaker?
House Republicans have nominated Steve Scalise, the Majority Leader, to become the next Speaker of the House. But it could be an uphill battle.
A handful of House Republicans threw the lower chamber of Congress into disarray when they ousted Speaker Kevin McCarthy from his job. For the first time in history Representatives voted to take the gavel away from a sitting Speaker in a motion to vacate.
Just over a week later the GOP caucus voted 113-99 to nominate the House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, to the No. 1 job as Speaker. He was chosen over Jim Jordan, the House Judiciary Chair, who had the full backing of Donald Trump. Despite the nomination vote, his path to the speakership will unlikely be a stroll in the park.
Who is Steve Scalise, the Republican nominee to be next House Speaker?
The current No. 2 House Republican has risen through party ranks since being elected to the House of Representatives by Louisiana’s 1st District in 2008. He served as the GOP Whip from 2014 until 2022. Prior to coming to Washington DC he had been a state representative since 1996.
One of the sticking points to Scalise being handed the gavel that has been expressed by at least one member of the House GOP is racism controversies that have dogged his career. In 2002, when he was a state representative, he addressed the European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO), a white-power group organized which was founded in 2000 and led by former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke.
“I personally cannot, in good conscience, vote for someone who attended a white supremacist conference and compared himself to David Duke,” said Rep. Nancy Mace. She was one of the eight Republicans that voted to vacate former Speaker McCarthy. Scalise has said of addressing EURO that “it was a mistake I regret, and I emphatically oppose the divisive racial and religious views groups like these hold.”
His political career was salvaged in light of the controversy in part by then-Rep. Cedric Richmond, a Black Democrat who said his fellow colleague in the Baton Rouge didn’t have a “racist bone in his body.”
As far as comparing himself to Duke, he reportedly told Stephanie Grace, a Louisiana political reporter and columnist, when they first met that “he was like David Duke without the baggage.” By that she thinks what he was trying to say is “he meant he supported the same policy ideas as David Duke, but he wasn’t David Duke, that he didn’t have the same feelings about certain people as David Duke did.”
Steve Scalise seeking to unify a fractious Republican party
While Jordan offered to give the nominating speech for Scalise there is no guarantee that it will sway those who have already pledged their support for the Judicial Chair to take the No. 1 job in the House and place him third in line to the presidency. One of those, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said on social media “I like Steve Scalise, and I like him so much that I want to see him defeat cancer more than sacrifice his health in the most difficult position in Congress.”
Scalise was recently diagnosed with multiple myeloma, “a very treatable blood cancer,” he said at the time and is undergoing treatment which has progressed positively. He alluded to his current “challenges” as well as the aid he received from fellow colleagues in 2017 when he was shot in calling for party unity to support his bid to become Speaker.
Bringing together the 217 votes he’ll need though will not be a cakewalk facing some surprise holdouts from a spectrum of factions within the House GOP including allies of McCarthy. Rep. Thomas Massie was quoted as saying there are at least 20 Republicans who won’t vote for him on the floor.