http://www.nationalreview.com/node/425390/print If Favorites Fall, Watch These Dark-Horse Candidates for House Speaker
By John Fund — October 11, 2015
The favorite candidates for speaker of both the House Republican establishment and the House Freedom Caucus are looking more like lost causes. Paul Ryan, the widely respected former vice-presidential nominee, still won’t change his mind and commit to running, and friends say he worries that becoming speaker could be a form of career suicide. Representative Jim Jordan, the founder of the House Freedom Caucus, says that his group won’t get on board for Ryan unless he agrees to reduce the speaker’s powers.
Jordan told Fox News Sunday that his group’s candidate is still Representative Daniel Webster, the 66-year-old from Florida who served as speaker of the Florida House in the 1990s before being elected to Congress in 2010.
“Our position right now is we know Daniel Webster,” Jordan told Chris Wallace on Fox. “We know he’s done this in Florida, where he took a model that was so controlled, top-down, centralized kind of power model. He diffused that kind of power and empowered the members. So I think that’s the model we want. I think whoever the next speaker is, Paul Ryan or anyone else, has to go to that kind of model.”
But the idea of Ryan as speaker is meeting resistance from conservatives who recall his support of comprehensive immigration reform, the bank bailouts that followed the 2008 financial crisis, and the pro-union legislation that pleased constituents in his blue-collar district in Wisconsin.
continued
