Haley says House members don’t need pay ‘until they fix this’ amid Speakership chaos

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley says members of the House don’t need to get paid “until they fix this” as the House scrambles to fill the Speakership vacancy left after Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) was ousted from the role. 

“They don’t need to leave until they fix this. They don’t need to get paid until they fix this,” Haley said in response to a question about how she would handle the GOP chaos if she was in the Oval Office, according to footage shared by Forbes. 

“What I will remind my fellow Republicans is, you don’t fix Democrat chaos with Republican chaos. Get it together. Get us a leader,” Haley said. Her comments come as she filed her candidacy for the 2024 New Hampshire primary.

Haley said the House chaos “doesn’t need to play out for Americans to see” and needs to instead happen “behind closed doors.” 

At the start of this year, it took 15 rounds of votes to elect McCarthy to the top House leadership slot. He was booted from the Speakership earlier this month, and Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) on Wednesday got his conference’s nomination for the role by a narrow margin in a closed-door vote.

But Scalise failed to secure the support he needed to win a floor vote, and withdrew from the Speakership race on Thursday. 

On Friday, House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who had lost to Scalise earlier in the week, snagged the Republican nomination in a second vote from the conference. 

House Republicans were set to leave on Friday for the weekend without a Speaker, with plans to return for a conference meeting on Monday. 

The Speaker-less House has been chaotic as Republicans see internal division over who will get the gavel. The discord comes as the Nov. 17 government funding deadline draws closer, upping the stakes.