adams. jeffries. adderholt. mccarthy. aguilar. jeffries. alford. mccarthy. allen. mccarthy. laura: so as the vote goes through the as right now we should point out that we are waiting for a couple of key names to come up, as you know them, waiting for the bs lauren boebert which is lauren boebert and andy biggs, the c andy crain and the gs, bob goode and matt gaetz. and so you re going through this chad pergram and picking out those key names because if when we get to the gs matt gaetz says kevin mccarthy looks like they ll the votes. three things to watch for what s the attendance, did anybody leave. see if there are any changes in
now, again, as i said, each vote is a little bit different. so maybe you have some people who thought this was all going to be wrapped up. they re already on a plane, they re driving somewhere and it depends which side they re on. okay. so you could trigger that roll call vote. this is where we get into some very dangerous turf potentially for kevin mccarthy. why? because it needs an outright majority of the house of members casting ballots for somebody by last name and hakeem jeffries on every single roll call vote with the exception of a couple when david trone was out was at 212. so suddenly, if you have just the right number of people who are away on the republican side of the aisle not there for kevin mccarthy and jeffries people stay in town and vote, guess what? you could have speaker jeffries. i know that sounds crazy with a capitol k. but that s kind of where we are right now. but you would be compelled to have that next vote no matter what.
it comes down to a single solitary vote. this vote was on the razor s edge. kevin mccarthy picked up significant steam here over the night. but he s not there just yet. so let s see how long they let this vote sit open and can they convince one of the other members who voted for somebody else by name, eli crain, bob goode, you get the idea here, or can they pry loose to get somebody like lauren boebert or matt gaetz to vote for mccarthy by name. he needs one vote, comes down to a solitary vote by name. laura: you know more this than anybody but i want to go through these numbers again to make sure we are exactly clear. so we are told when you vote present it lowers the threshold. the magic number was always 218. it lowers the threshold if one person votes present the magic number becomes 217. if two people vote present the magic number we were told comes down to 216. now we re seeing two people have
so what they probably want to do is take a timeout. you know, this was a pretty intense set of conversations on the floor. the problem is, does kevin mccarthy lose anybody? do you have people not show up? each vote is going to be different. the mathis going to be different if you have different people s dispositions. does wesley hunt have to travel again. how is ken buck s health? you have three other ken bucks. are democrats all there? at some point these levies break and shift. that s why it is algebra when you try to get this speaker vote set up here. so we ll see now, keep in mind, they might not go out. if they do not vote to adjourn, they have to immediately go to that 15th ballot. so here in the next 10 or 15 minutes we ll know what s going on but we have to wait until they close this vote trace. thank you chad we ll get back to you in moments. let s bring back bret baier and you have information coming from the floor. what do you know? well, there s just a lot of
but my question to you, chad, would be, you know as the speaker of the house as we ve seen many times over several years, the speaker of the house needs to know how many votes he has going into various situations and they came up a vote short tonight and a lot of people are going to ask this question if they re not already asking it is how do you screw that up. how do you mess that up by one vote? i mean, they were elated all day and even matt gaetz and lauren boebert were on hannity tonight and they were satisfied with the way this thing is going. and now suddenly we re a vote short and nobody s quite sure exactly why. i have an answer for you. because kevin mccarthy, when he was the whip, majority leader, minority leader, same with steve scalise, their forte was not counting votes. they were inconsistent when they were in the majority sometimes even in the minority. you know who was really good at counting votes? nancy pelosi, to a member she passed major bills consistently