If Conservatives Want to Dump Boehner, The Magic Number is 16

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…If conservatives want to unseat Boehner, they’d only need 16 members to abstain from supporting him in January. That’s because Boehner needs 218 votes to become Speaker again. Seeing as there are 233 House Republicans next Congress, and assuming no Democrats would vote for Boehner as Speaker, if 16 conservative Republicans abstain from voting, Boehner wouldn’t regain the Speakership.

“The Conservative Movement doesn’t realize we only need 16 House votes to block Boehner from becoming Speaker,” Ryun said. “House rules demand nominees for speaker to receive a majority—at least 218 votes—to win election. If 16 members abstain, Boehner only has 217 votes.”

The Republican caucus already locked the votes for leadership slots up in conference shortly after the election, but it has to be made official at the beginning of the next Congress in January. That means conservatives upset with Boehner’s leadership technically could band together to ouster him.

After this week’s Boehner purge of conservatives from influential committee roles, enough Republicans might be perturbed enough to do something about it – especially with Boehner threatening retaliation against more than just the four conservatives he’s already yanked from their committee spots if anyone else doesn’t toe the leadership line.

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I hope they dump John Boehner quickly and get somebody with guts that can communicate. GOP is losing the PR war along with everything else. There must be someone on the GOP House side that is presentable and can hold tough?

Sounds like a good plan only problem is the lefties like a loser as the republican speaker 16 dems would vote yes for him –LOL

I posted the info on Facebook and Twitter. I suggest others do. We all can contact our House representative and ask them to vote him out. Be sure to leave the link to the story.

If the “Nay ” Conservative Republicans wait until the last minute, then the Democrats would have likely already voted “Nay”. Conservatives should all ask their Conservative Republican Reps to vote ” Nay” so that the more than 16 Conservatives vote against Boehner

I read that some Republican posters on other forums are posting that if Boehner doesn’t get the votes needed to be elected speaker, that Pelosi might get it. That would only be true if Pelosi received more votes than Boehner, and if they tied (hint, hint) there would have to be another vote.

Perhaps the intelligent way to do it would be simply for Conservative Republicans to grow some “cohones”, and as a group meet with Boehner and his stacked steering commitee, and make it very clear that they are fully willing go the “nuclear route” even if it means Pelosi wins, (which is unlikely unless she were able to get 218 votes,) unless Boehner and the committee back-off and put Conservatives back on the various committees they lost representation on. There have been other Speaker elections where it took multiple votes until someone received the requisite 218 majority, (as getting the most votes is not enough.)

Certainly the party establishment would warn about punishment, but the Conservatives still have Boehner and the party leadership over a barrel in that they need Conservative votes to pass Republican bills. A waged war within the party needs to happen as it is the only way that the leadership ideologues will understand that they pushed Conservatives too far.

This disobedience Conservatives should also be carried over in the selection and voting for of the leader of the RNC. They need to fight the party to ensure those that voted for them are represented.

If the power-heady GOP leaders still wants to act belligerent against the Conservatives, the final course of action would be for the Conservative Republicans to declare that they no longer have faith in the party leadership or it’s direction and that it is may be time for them to jump-ship. (Perhaps threatening to become libertarians, or the Constitution Party.

@Ditto: #5
I suggest that the ones from Boehner’s state contact him and tell him that if he doesn’t reinstate the ones he took off of the committees, and that if he doesn’t go back to the Tea Party principals, he won’t be reelected.

The more I hear about things like this happening in congress, the more fearful I am that our congress has been infiltrated by ones who want to bring our country down. More and more people are figuring out that obama wants to ban ALL guns, and are getting very suspicious of whether or not he has the country’s best interest at heart. They are going out and buying the guns and ammo that obama doesn’t want them to have before obama gets them banned. No wonder my ammo supplyer doesn’t know how long it will be before he can get me more.