Underdog Candidate Jumps Into Speaker’s Contest

The race for House Speaker took an unexpected turn on Friday.

A relatively unknown Congressman, Rep. Austin Scott (Ga.) has entered the race to become the next Speaker teeing up a challenge to Jim Jordan hours after GOP nominee Steve Scalise dropped out of the race.

The New York Times described Scott as “a mainstream conservative and ally of the ousted former Speaker Kevin McCarthy,” and said he is putting himself forward “as a protest candidate against Mr. Jordan, the hard-right Republican who is the chairman of the Judiciary Committee.”

The Hill has more:

“I don’t necessarily want to be the speaker of the House. I want a House that functions correctly, but the House is not functioning correctly right now,” he said.

Scott told reporters he had “no intention” of running for Speaker this morning.

“I care more about the conference and that it’s doing our job than I care about who the Speaker is. I truly do,” Scott said. “When I woke up this morning I had no intention of doing this.”

“I believe is if we as Republicans are gonna be the majority, we have to do the right things the right way. And we’re not doing that right now,” he later added.

Mediaite reported that during a segment on MSNBC, Brendan Buck, a former aide to past Speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan, stopped short of calling Scott a “hothead,” but made it clear that he’s no fan of the “meddling” Freedom Caucus. Buck also posited that Scott’s run is more about making a point than actually wanting to be Speaker.

“Well, I think Austin Scott is serving a very particular purpose in this race. Austin Scott, as was mentioned, is not anybody who has ever established himself as a real leader in the conference, but he is someone who has stood out as someone who gets very frustrated by the Freedom Caucus meddling in the plans. He is as conservative as they come, but he was a regular visitor to the speaker’s office when I was there, coming in, just could not believe what the Freedom Caucus was doing that day to describe what was going on, and he’s… I wouldn’t call him a hothead, but he runs, he runs hot. And it’s very clear to me at this point when Jim Jordan was about to be going into this race without anybody challenging him, Austin Scott, I imagine, stood up and said, “I’m not going to let this happen.”

Before making his announcement on Friday, Scott told CNN’s Manu Raju that House Republicans trying to mess with the speaker race made his conference look “like a bunch of idiots.”

Scott is a seven-term member of Congress first elected in 2011 to represent Georgia’s eighth district, is a member of the House Intelligence Committee as well as the House Armed Services Committee and the House Agricultural Committee. 

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