Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.) tells Fox News host Maria Bartiromo (below) that she currently supports Majority Leader of the House Rep. Steve Scalise for Speaker of the House, a position involuntarily vacated by Kevin McCarthy this week. Tenney said she’s supporting Scalise “because he’s the one person who has reached out to me.” But Tenney doesn’t believe the job will be easy to manage — for Scalise or any other Republican candidate.
Enraged by the eight Republicans who voted to remove McCarthy, Tenney says: “These people are going to hold hostage whoever the next Speaker is” and “the Democrats are gleeful.” (NOTE: The White House says it’s not gleeful.)
Tenney admits that the day after McCarthy was ousted she had to clear her email of all the fundraising pitches she received from Matt Gaetz, Andy Biggs and Nancy Mace (three of eight Republicans who voted against McCarthy). They are now actively trying to raise money “off of bringing down the Majority,” says Tenney. “It’s absurd,” she added.
Calling McCarthy’s ouster a “colossal failure,” Tenney says: “I have never seen anything so malicious as the lies that were told on the House floor yesterday by people I consider to be good conservatives.” (Tenney emphasizes the extraordinary level of lies and maliciousness this week by reminding viewers that it outdid even what she saw during her days in the New York legislature.)
Tenney says of McCarthy: “We just unloaded our most prolific fundraiser, who is out there creating the committees, helping us to get where we need to go. And look I’m not a huge Kevin fan. I like Kevin. I think he’s done yeoman’s work.” Tenney adds, “We have to leave our personal grievances at the door and stick together. Because you know who sticks together, the Democrats.”
Tenney points out that when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) first arrived in Washington, D.C. in 2018, the freshman “objected” to then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, but in the end AOC stuck by Pelosi.
In September 2022, AOC told GQ magazine that “the perceived clash” between her and Pelosi was overblown and mentioned “the media’s obsession with pitting successful women against each other.”
