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Rep. Tom Cole says “the reservoir of goodwill is enormous” for House Speaker amid effort to oust him
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Washington — Rep. Tom Cole, an Oklahoma Republican who leads the House Appropriations Committee, said Sunday that despite a growing threat to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson, he’s “much stronger than people seem to think,” noting that “the reservoir of goodwill is enormous.”
“I actually think he’s, you know, empowered the center and marginalized the extremes on each side,” Cole said on “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “Now, is there some risk for that? Sure. But the point is, he’s gotten a lot done. I think people admire him. They genuinely like him.”
The Louisiana Republican has faced pushback in recent weeks for his handling of the government funding process, prompting Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, to file a motion to vacate, threatening to bring up a vote for his ouster. That frustration was bolstered by his shepherding of a foreign aid package that the House approved on Saturday, which some conservatives also opposed. And though Greene has yet to commit to a timeline for bringing up a vote on Johnson’s removal, she’s gained some backers in recent days.
The effort to oust Johnson now has three public Republican supporters: Greene, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Paul Gosar of Arizona, who announced his support for the effort on Friday. Republicans have a razor-thin majority at the moment, so Johnson can only afford to lose one vote unless they get support from Democrats.
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But Cole made clear that “it’s a relatively small number” of Republicans who would support a motion to oust Johnson, saying he doesn’t anticipate that “we’d lose the same number of Republicans that we lost with Kevin McCarthy,” who was last year the first speaker to be removed from his post in October under similar circumstances.
“There’s a lot of people that like the speaker, that respect the speaker, even when they disagree with him,” Cole said. “They know he’s honest, he’s a straight shooter. They also had a taste of what it’s like to go without a speaker for three weeks. I don’t think they want that again.”
Joining the eight Republicans who voted to boot McCarthy from the post was every Democrat. And the same might not be true for Johnson. Cole said he doesn’t believe there’s unified Democratic support to remove Johnson, saying that it’s unlikely for Democrats who supported the foreign aid package, particularly its aid for Ukraine, to vote to oust the speaker.
“I think both sides have now seen how dangerous this is, how irresponsible it is,” Cole said. “But if somebody wants to do it, it’s within the rules and they can take their shot.”
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Trump ally Nigel Farage heckles his hecklers as his far-right Reform UK Party makes gains in U.K. election
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The Labour Party and its leader, new British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, undoubtedly won the U.K. general election, but as he set to work building his new cabinet, there was another politician keen to crow about his party’s election windfall, much smaller though it was. Nigel Farage, the leader of the far-right Reform UK party and long one of Britain’s most divisive politicians, was heckled by a series of protesters as he took the stage to deliver a speech in London on Friday.
He smiled through the interruptions, and even heckled his hecklers back, loudly chanting “boring!” as they were removed from the hall.
Reform UK grabbed only four seats in the British Parliament’s 650-seat House of Commons in Thursday’s national election. But that’s four more than it had before.
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Farage argues that the U.K.’s first-past-the-post voting system makes it difficult for smaller parties to match their overall share of the votes with their share of seats won in the Commons, and he vowed on Friday to push for an end to the current system. But the real success for Farage was in the overall vote tally, not the four seats his party won, which included his own first election to the parliament.
To the consternation of the long-ruling Conservative Party, from which it pilfered a huge amount of support, the anti-immigration Reform UK, whose leader and policies had long been relegated to the fringes of British politics, took about 15% of the vote, with just over 4 million ballots in total.
That gave Reform UK the third-highest overall vote count among all the parties that competed for the parliamentary seats, overtaking even the Liberal Democrats, who, despite getting about half a million fewer votes, emerged on Friday with a record 71 seats in the Commons.
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Farage, 60, won the seat in his home constituency of Clacton, in southeast England, after seven previous failed attempts. His Reform UK party, founded initially in 2018 as the Brexit Party, advocating for a complete and uncompromising break with the European Union, has always campaigned on cutting immigration to Britain.
The Englishman is often compared to his transatlantic ally former U.S. President Donald Trump, for both his brash political style and his nationalist rhetoric, and he’s appeared at events with the Republican in the U.S. and met with him in Britain, too.
“Congratulations to Nigel Farage on his big WIN of a Parliament Seat Amid Reform UK Election Success. Nigel is a man who truly loves his Country!” Trump wrote on his own social media platform, Truth Social, on Friday. Mr. Trump made no mention of the Labour Party’s landslide election victory, or Starmer becoming the new prime minister.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty
Farage’s campaign was marred by a number of 11th-hour controversies, mostly involving racist or sexist comments attributed to Reform UK candidates, and on election day he vowed to “professionalize” his party.
“Those few bad apples that have crept in will be long gone and we will never have any of their type back in our organization,” Farage told his supporters, along with the British public and his keenly observing political opponents.
Speaking to CBS News’ Emmet Lyons on Friday morning as the election results were finalized, the Labour Party Mayor of London Sadiq Khan acknowledged the rise of “popular nativist, nationalist movements,” and said Starmer would govern “in the national interest, show humility, be magnanimous and be humble over the course of the next three, four, five years.”
“We’ve got to earn the trust of those that voted Labour, but also try and win the confidence of those that didn’t,” he said.
That will undoubtedly be one of the chief missions of both the Labour and Conservative Parties in the years ahead.
They’ll both be eager to craft political strategies ahead of the next national election that can stop voters following the trend to the far-right seen across Europe in recent years – a trend which, despite their minimal presence in Parliament, was also demonstrated by Reform UK’s share of the votes this week.
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