Editor's Note: Republican lawmakers have selected Rep. Tom Emmer as their nominee for House Speaker in a fifth round of secret ballot voting.
If they’re successful, Republican lawmakers will emerge at some point with their speaker nominee three weeks after ousting Rep. Kevin McCarthy from the powerful post.
The first round of secret ballot voting was scheduled for mid-morning Tuesday to gauge support for eight names - formerly nine names - after Rep. Gary Palmer dropped out. After three rounds of counting, moderate GOP Rep. Tom Emmer was reportedly leading the list of candidates.
All eight speaker hopefuls have scored in the 90-plus percentile on The Family Research Council Scorecard, a tool used by the FRC to track support by members of Congress for issues of faith, family, freedom and other important conservative causes.
Before he dropped out, Palmer (Alabama) led the way with a 100 percent score. However, Rep. Emmer, perhaps the most well-known of the candidates, has scored 93 percent.
Emmer currently serves as Majority Whip and has been in the U.S. House since 2015. He was considered by media outlets, such as Fox News, to be the frontrunner in the list of eight names.
Among the votes dropping Emmer’s score was his support for the Respect For Marriage Act, which was signed into law by President Joe Biden last December. The put into federal statute same-sex marriage which became recognized in the U.S. in 2015 with the Supreme Court ruling in the Obergefell v. Hodges case.
“(Respect For Marriage Act) was a bill that we strongly opposed and did what we could to highlight why no elected officials should vote for this bill, but unfortunately, he did vote for that,” Travis Weber, FRC’s vice president for policy and government affairs, said on Washington Watch Monday.
Emmer’s score has been lowered also by votes that favored transgender protections in the military and for the Maloney Amendment in 2016, which banned federal contractors from discriminating based on sexual orientation or gender identity.
Another name getting a lot of early attention, Rep. Byron Donalds (Florida), (pictured at top) has scored 98.7 percent. Donalds and Emmer have both supported the legalization of marijuana.
“That is a thread we've seen even when those votes happened. We recall noting some Republicans voting for the Safe Banking Act, which would provide for the facilitation of marijuana-related transactions in the banking system and against DOJ enforcement. So, there's this thought of, ‘Just let the states deal with it’ or, ‘It’s in the system anyway,’ and this is problematic for a number of reasons,” Weber told show host Tony Perkins.
“As we continue to put the reasons and argumentation out there, and the evidence comes to light about what happens when you legitimize drugs, hopefully elected officials will see that," he added.
