House Speaker John Boehner probably doesn't have the votes to hang onto his gavel if he chooses to run for re-election, Rep. Mo Brooks says.
The Alabama Republican, who supported Boehner in 2013, doesn't think the Ohio congressman will even run again for the leadership post.
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"I’ll be mildly surprised if he can get the 218 votes that the Constitution requires," Brooks told
The Hill about Boehner's chances for re-election as speaker.
"I don't think John Boehner will be speaker this time next year," Brooks predicted. "But I think it's because, in my judgment, he's not going to run for reelection as speaker."
It's generally thought that Boehner wants to keep the job.
Though a group of conservatives
tried to boot Boehner in January 2013, Brooks, who voted for Boehner then, isn't sure which way he'd lean next time around.
"I need to see who exactly is running to make a choice," he told The Hill.
Brooks' prediction comes as Boehner tries to paddle out of hot water with fellow Republicans
for saying they lacked the grit to go after immigration reform.
"Here's the attitude. 'Ohhhh. Don't make me do this. Ohhhh. This is too hard,'" Boehner said at a Rotary Club lunch in his home state last week, adding: "We get elected to make choices, we get elected to solve problems, and it's remarkable to me how many of my colleagues just don't want to . . . They'll take the path of least resistance."
On Tuesday, Boehner joked, "You only tease the ones you love," The Hill reported, though he conceded he may have pushed the joke "a little too much."
Brooks said the bluster wasn't helping Boehner's chances for re-election as speaker.
"He is just not acting like an individual who is doing the things you would need to do to get reelected Speaker of the House," Brooks told The Hill, ticking off a stream of Boehner's purported mistakes.
"It might be the acquisition of the residency in Florida, it might be blaming the Republicans, his own caucus, for the shutdown, it might be blaming his own caucus for the impasse over immigration, it might be the rather salty language he has used to describe some of his own Republican Conference members, but you add all these things, and that's just not the kind of conduct you would expect from someone who is going to run for speaker," Brooks said.
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