caucus. luke? reporter: hey, brian, i m here with charlie dent, republican from pennsylvania, definitely more moderate. what happened today? it s pretty obvious what happened. members wanted to take down john boehner, i always said would try to frag the next guy. they just did it to kevin mccarthy. kevin mccarthy had a strong majority of votes among the house republican conference. did he have 180 votes or something closer to 210 votes. he did not have 218 votes. the concern was that if kevin were to go on the house floor, present himself as a speaker candidate, that he failed to get 218 points and would obviously be embarrassed and humiliated. i think that s what largely drove this decision today. i didn t speak to him prior, i didn t know he was going to do this. i was just as shocked as anyone. but the challenge for our conference is quite simple. we need to assemble bipartisan coalitions to pass any important legislation around here. we may have to assemble a bipartisan coaliti
moderate republicans, and he said what the majority of my colleagues, almost all of my colleagues on the democratic side agree with. that is that in order to make decisions, we need to work together. we need a governing majority of the house. the republicans need to reject passing legislation only with a majority of the republicans in congress. we can find common ground. we should reach across the aisle. in fact, with congressman dan webster, one of the candidates for speaker, he and i don t agree on almost anything but we have hosted bipartisan dinners and those have been designed to get to know one another across the aisle, to make assumptions that if you know a little bit more about somebody personally, you probably are going to have an easier time working with them. trying to work together and make sure that the my way or the highway politics that the pea partiers in congress have engaged in is set aside, has just been dealt a huge setback
to reach out to the tuesday group and to every faction, the freedom caucus who had introduced mr. webster, the liberty caucus, some of the conservative groups who had endorsed mr. webster. they want someone who is going to bring everybody together and work to accomplish the things the american people have sent us here to work. kevin mccarthy is a very good man who has done a great job as the majority leader and i have always found him to have an open door policy. congress is about relationships and being able to work toward the things that are for the good of the country and to represent your district well. congresswoman, you spoke about how you view this as kind of the voice of the majority. we are speaking about his role as majority leader. what is the house republican majority? how do you define it as we sit
a six-seat majority. we had to pull together very quickly. we did. i think we can pull together again. they ve got a much larger majority this time. so this is hardly the demise of the party, but the quicker they get this resolved the better. it will have to be a consensus choice. it wouldn t be a freedom caucus choice, it won t be establishment. it will be somebody that is acceptable to all the dirt wiff wings that can move ahead. you have issues with many looing deadlines such as the debt ceiling. i also note that for the freedom caucus, the end result of what they ve done here is probably have speaker boehner sitting there to resolve debt ceiling and some other issues in a way they might have had their hand strengthened had they moved ahead with the speaker s race. very interesting. certainly a big development. but we all know that democracy is chaotic, a little bit messy, and today we re seeing how it all is still a little bit messy and trying to make it all work.
here today? the house republican majority is a big tent majority, quite frankly. you have so many different groups that come from all over the country, that come from so many different thought processes, and bring those to bear. you have people that have worked in small businesses. you have people that have come out of the classroom who have been teaching, people who are health care professionals, people that choose to give up a part of their career and come here because they love this country very much. they are willing to leave their homes and come here and fight for freedom, free people, free markets. it s a very talented and very robust conference. indeed, there s a lot of unused talent in our conference, people that want to jump in and be a part of solving the problems that face our nation. look at what has happened through the obama years with the