Jan. 4, 2023 10p
(WGTD)---There’s a local, historical connection to the current logjam among majority Republicans in the U.S. House who are struggling to elect a speaker, and an equivalent mess that occurred 100 years ago when it took Republicans months to elect its leader.
Back then, a congressman from Racine was put up by a splinter group of Republicans to run against the mainstream party choice.
Henry Cooper was a former Racine prosecutor who represented southeast Wisconsin from 1893 to 1919, and again from 1921 until his death in 1931. NPR’s Ron Elving writes on npr.org that Cooper was aligned with Wisconsin’s legendary progressive governor and Sen. Robert “Fighting Bob” LaFollette.
In the end, Cooper lost out to the Kevin McCarthy of that era, a man by the name of Frederick Gillett of Massachusetts.
Elving says eventually some of Cooper’s backers simply voted ‘present’ but it took nine ballots to get Gillett over the hump.
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