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Saturday, January 8, 2011

Democrats' defection from Pelosi is historic

...this appears to be the first time in at least 35 years that the number of Democrats not supporting their speaker candidate has been in double digits.

On the Republican side, the GOP's unanimous support for Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) was one of only a handful of cases where one party has voted 100 percent for its candidate for speaker. Rarely has an entire party caucus been present, with everyone voting for it's speaker nominee. Boehner, as is custom, did not vote for himself.

Washington Post
By Aaron Blake and Chris Cillizza
How divided are Democrats' right now?

With 19 Democrats withholding support from Nancy Pelosi for House speaker on Wednesday, it represented the largest defection from a party's speaker nominee in nearly a century.

The resistance in the Democratic Party to back now-former Speaker Pelosi (D-Calif.) in the ceremonial first vote of the 112th Congress registered higher than at any point since 1913, according to data from the Congressional Research Service.

That year, which happens to be the last year for which records are available, featured 23 votes for Republicans other than that party's speaker nominee. Of the 19 Democrats who didn't support Pelosi on Wednesday, 18 voted for other Democrats and one voted "present."

In no other election in between do the numbers approach those two races (with an asterisk next to 1923, when 22 votes were cast for other Republicans on the first of nine ballots; by the ninth and final ballot, though, there were only two defectors). (Continues)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

how about the death od john p wheeler?????????