Meet the 9 Republican Speaker Candidates, Nearly All of Whom Tried to Overturn the 2020 Election

Since Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) was ousted as House Speaker lifetimes ago, Reps. Steve “David Duke without the baggage” Scalise (R-La.) and Jim “Gym” Jordan (R-OH) have both put their hats in the ring and failed spectacularly as the world laughed and cried, and at least one Republican member was compelled to pray. After Jordan’s third failed vote for Speaker, in the wake of a conflagration of cyberbullying and death threat allegations in his name, nine (9) (!!) different candidates for House Speaker declared their candidacies by noon on Sunday, which was Rep. Elise Stefanik’s (R-N.Y.) specified deadline.

Those candidates are—and prepare to hear a lot of names you’ve probably never heard before!!!—Reps. Jack Berman (R-Mich.), Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), Kevin Hern (R-Okla.), Mike Johnson (R-La.), Dan Meuser (R-Pa.), Gary Palmer (R-Ala.), Austin Scott (R-Ga.), and Pete Sessions (R-Texas). (The field is noticeably void of women, because apparently no matter how many times some mutation of the same crusty white man tries and fails, they are still preferable to women..?) To quote one Twitter user, “ok now they’re just making up congressmen.”

On first read of the names of these particularly self-important individuals—who somehow watched the public humiliations of McCarthy, Scalise, and Jordan and still decided, It’s my time to shine!—all I could think of was Keke Palmer’s iconic 2019 line: “I hate to say it, I hope I don’t sound ridiculous, I don’t know who this man is.” And on first glimpse of (almost) all of their decidedly lily-white Congressional portraits, I was struck by the feeling that this was all some sort of gag: Who is AI-generated and who is a real Republican Congressman???

For your convenience, I’ve scraped together the varying oddities and scandals of each of these men’s careers and taken it upon myself to introduce you to the utter charisma void that is the Republican House Speaker field—which consists largely of Wife Guys, insurrectionists, and total randos. Few are remarkable, none are good, seven didn’t vote to certify the 2020 presidential election results, and all are complete and utter dweebs. Unfortunately, one of them may—or, at this rate, may not!—be our next House Speaker. Come Monday evening, the candidates will make their pitches at a caucus candidate forum before a secret ballot scheduled for bright and early Tuesday morning.

At a young, spry, 76 years of age, Bergman announced his candidacy for Speaker in a bid to liven things up a little...I presume. The Tea Party Republican won his seat in 2016 running on the same ~outsider~ image as then-Republican nominee Donald Trump, and was, indeed, such an outsider that in 2021, he claimed his wife once said to him, “Oh sure, who’s gonna vote for you? Nobody knows you.” That no-nonsense question could just as easily apply to this very Speaker race, Mrs. Bergman! Like nearly all his rivals, Bergman voted to decertify the 2020 presidential election results and, last fall, he voted against a bipartisan bill to protect same-sex and interracial marriage.

“My hat is in the ring, and I feel confident I can win the votes where others could not,” Bergman said in his Friday announcement. Sure, dude.

When I think of Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Okla.), which admittedly isn’t very often (this is not an interesting man), I don’t know what comes to mind first. The obsession with adding fetuses to the workforce, perhaps? Having somewhere between $1 million and $2.6 million in PPP (Paycheck Protection Program) loans forgiven amid the covid pandemic, only to rail against student loan forgiveness? His origin story of running a McDonald’s chain in his home state, prompting colleagues to dub him the “McCongressman”? Take your pick.

“I’ve spoken to every Member of the Conference over the last few weeks. We need a different type of leader who has a proven track record of success, which is why I’m running for Speaker of the House,” Hern said upon announcing his candidacy on Friday. He notably did not elaborate on what makes him, another 60+-year-old white man, a “different type of leader.”

Emmer, the current House Majority Whip, announced his candidacy on Saturday, and his bid is apparently already in trouble due to his strained relationship with former President Trump. The head of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), Emmer reportedly once called for Republican candidates to distance themselves from the former president, and the move has prompted top Trump allies in the House to coalesce against his candidacy, Vanity Fair reported on Monday. One Trump surrogate recently called Emmer “Nancy Pelosi in a suit,” which doesn’t make much sense because Pelosi actually wears suits.

Emmer is one of the two Speaker candidates who didn’t vote to decertify the 2020 election, per CBS. But in 2020, he nonetheless supported a lawsuit filed by Texas to overturn the results of the presidential election in all the key swing states where Trump lost. Make it make sense!

Donalds announced his candidacy for Speaker on Friday but it’s not his first time being considered. In January, amid the 15 long votes that it took for McCarthy to win the Speakership, a handful of far-right House members voted for Donalds—who is one of few Black House Republicans—and very pointedly quoted Martin Luther King, Jr., while doing so. It was extremely weird!!

Donalds is regarded as a rising star in his party and, as a vocal supporter of former President Trump, he gleefully took shots at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) earlier this year, namely criticizing pieces of Florida state curriculum that teach the lie that there were “benefits” to slavery. Of course, before you applaud this basic thread of connection to reality, remember that as recently as July, he maintained that Joe Biden is not really president.

“My sole focus will be on securing our border, funding our government responsibly, advancing a conservative vision for the House of Representatives and the American people, and expanding our Republican majority,” he said in his announcement.

To answer your first question: No, Dan Meuser and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) are not related to my knowledge. The basic facts of Dan Meuser are few and unimportant. He voted to decertify the 2020 election and, ironically enough, considering his Speaker announcement pledge to “weed out corruption,” he’s no stranger to a good corruption scandal himself. In the summer of 2021, a watchdog organization reported that Meuser had “failed to report in a timely way that his wife and children purchased as much as $600,000 worth of stock at the depths of the pandemic stock market crash.” Meuser chalked this up to “human error” or, to put it colloquially, a little ~oopsie~. Let’s take that precision and attention to detail all the way to the Speakership, Dan.

What differentiates Johnson from the rest of the crowded, nine-person Speaker field, you may ask? The answer is... not much. Johnson is just another election-denier, who actually went above and beyond run-of-the-mill election denialism to send a mass email to Republican colleagues in December 2020, asking them to join a petition to decertify election results in key states that went for Biden. President Trump, he told his colleagues at the time, is “anxiously awaiting the final list.” Cool and normal stuff, my guy! Johnson’s one other notable is that he was very embarrassingly and loudly booed for voicing opposition to reparations for Black Americans—on Juneteenth, of all days—in 2019.

I know what you must be thinking: How many more AI-generated Republican white men must I suffer through? Just a couple more, I promise. I now present you with Mr. Gary Palmer, another election denier who’s distinguished himself from the rest of his field with uniquely racist comments. In March, Palmer called Washington, D.C. public schools “crappy” and claimed they produce criminals—a transparently racist comment given the demographics of D.C. public schools. In a sad indictment of the state of his party, I can only imagine these comments will help rather than hurt Palmer in his bid for Speaker.

Sessions’ announcement claims he “can forge a positive path as a conservative leader who can unite the Conference.” And it’s this rainbow vomit of toxic positivity that reminds me of his 2022 argument that students can prevent endemic school shootings by *checks notes* “being nice to each other.” If students were “taking time every day to be nice to each other,” they could “identify people who have problems” and intervene to stop a future shooting, he said at a House hearing in the wake of the Uvalde shooting in his state of Texas in June 2022. Whatever he has to tell himself to justify taking approximately zero action to change gun laws and protect young people, I guess.

On top of this, NBC reported in 2019 that Sessions was “unnamed Congressman-1" in an indictment against Rudy Giuliani, which implicated Sessions for accepting thousands in campaign donations from two Russian Trump donors accused of campaign finance violations. On top of this, Insider reported last year that Sessions appeared to violate a federal conflict-of-interest and transparency law by failing to properly report seven of his stock trades from 2021. At least he had enough shame to not pledge to “wEeD oUt cOrRuPtIoN” in his candidacy announcement, I guess.

Austin Scott first announced his candidacy earlier this month shortly after Scalise bowed out of the race, mostly to be a ~protest candidate~ against Jim Jordan. “When I woke up this morning, I had no intentions of doing this. It took me a long time to even get to my wife to tell her to call all our friends and be in prayer because we haven’t done any preparation or any whipping or anything for this,” he told reporters upon entering the Speaker race. I have to wonder: What, exactly, are all his friends supposed to pray for—for House Republicans to magically become serious people overnight???

Scott is regarded by legacy media as a more “mainstream” Republican, though you should take this with a grain of salt because any Republican who isn’t Matt Gaetz or Majorie Taylor Greene is considered “mainstream” these days. Alongside Emmer, he’s one of two candidates who actually voted to certify the 2020 presidential election. More recently, Scott has been vocally critical of how directionless his caucus is sans a House Speaker, telling CNN on Thursday that their inability to pick a leader “makes us look like a bunch of idiots.” Of course, the race would probably go at least a little smoother were it not for the nine-fucking-candidates—an issue that Scott’s long-shot bid incidentally contributes to!