Fox News co-host Brian Kilmeade had choice words for a Republican Member of Congress earlier this afternoon.
Kilmeade called Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) a “dumba**” after he became the first member of the House Republican Conference to vote in opposition to Jim Jordan's nomination for speaker.
With a 221-seat Republican majority, Jordan can only afford to lose four votes. In the first round of voting, the outspoken Ohio conservative lost 20 GOP votes.
Mediaite's Sarah Rumpf has more:
Republicans hold a very slim majority in the House, and it's led to multiple struggles and stumbles as the party grapples with the demands from hardliners like Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and attempts to achieve unity on even the simplest procedural decisions.
Gaetz infamously helped derail Rep. Kevin McCarthy's (R-CA) Speaker ambitions, forcing his Californian colleague to endure an excruciating fifteen rounds of voting and make concessions that included allowing a single member to file a motion to vacate. Earlier this month, Gaetz and his allies in the House were angered by the deal McCarthy cut with Democrats to pass a stopgap spending bill and avoid a government shutdown, among other intraparty disputes, and triggered that motion to vacate.
On the afternoon of Oct. 3, McCarthy was ousted from his position, and the caucus has been unable to unify behind any one candidate. Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) was an early top contender, winning a majority of a closed vote of the GOP caucus but fell a few short of what was needed to win with the full vote of the House, and stepped aside.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) has similarly been able to get the majority of the votes from the closed-door GOP caucus vote, but is even further away from the total votes needed, despite increasingly vocal agitation from Republicans to get this resolved — and even some behind-the-scenes nudging from Fox News' Sean Hannity.
On Monday, Mediaite reported that Hannity's producers aggressively lobbied Jordan's critics to get in line.
Rumors soon circulated that relatively moderate members of the GOP caucus grew irritated by the pressure campaign, believing Jordan to be too much of a bomb-thrower to be speaker.
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