Gingrich or Santorum as speaker? House conservatives plot mischief for the fall.

Several influential House conservatives are privately plotting ways to use the legislative calendar this fall to push their hard-line agenda — including quiet discussions about possibly mounting a leadership challenge to House Speaker Paul D. Ryan.

The group has gone so far as to float the idea of recruiting former House speaker Newt Gingrich or former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum as potential replacements for Ryan (R-Wis.) should there be a rebellion. The Constitution does not require that an elected member of the House serve as speaker.

While the chances that a non-House member could mount a credible threat to Ryan are exceedingly slim, the fact that the group has even toyed with the idea underscores their desire to create trouble for GOP leaders if they believe their demands are not being addressed.

The closed-door conversations are being led by Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, in consultation with his allies on the right, in particular Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist who recently returned to his perch as executive chairman of the Breitbart News website. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and other Freedom Caucus members are also involved in the talks to varying degrees, according to nearly a dozen people with knowledge of the discussions.

On Wednesday, Meadows, Jordan and Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) took their concerns directly to Ryan, telling him in a private meeting in the Capitol that his failure to enact conservative priorities could diminish his support among conservatives.

Even so, the group of more than 30 conservative House lawmakers is unlikely to stage a successful coup to push out Ryan and has so far shown unease about translating their grievances into action. But the mere fact that they are discussing the prospect — and strategizing with Bannon — underscores both their desire and ability to disrupt an already daunting legislative schedule.

Rep. David Brat (R-Va.), who toppled then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a 2014 primary race, channeled the concerns of some of his colleagues in an interview Tuesday, saying many House conservatives are unhappy about the way the Republican leadership is handling the party’s legislative check list this month.

“I don’t want to go there yet,” Brat said of the discussions of a possible leadership shake-up. “But it’s up to the leadership, right now, to get it straight.”

Brat added: “The big picture is that we’ve failed on Obamacare, we didn’t do what we said we’d do. What’s it going to look like on tax? What about the debt ceiling? No one is really sure. We said we’d do all of these different things and we have to follow through.”

[Freedom Caucus vent to Paul Ryan after talks with Steve Bannon]

Brat’s remarks came before Trump further upended Republican politics Wednesday by siding with Democrats on favoring a short-term debt-limit increase, giving Democrats more leverage in the months to come.

Bannon and Meadows have been talking for weeks and huddled Monday afternoon at the “Breitbart Embassy” — a Capitol Hill townhouse that houses Bannon’s office and the website’s offices. Matthew Boyle, Breitbart’s Washington editor, also joined the conversation.

In conversations with friends and associates, Bannon has described the potential move against Ryan, should tensions escalate, as the beginning of a “war” against the Republican establishment.

Kurt Bardella, a former spokesman for Breitbart News, said working in tandem with the website and a potentially receptive president could allow the Freedom Caucus to wield outsize influence over Republican leadership. 

“The core difference is before you didn’t have an occupant in the Oval Office who would have signed any of this into law under any scenario, and certainly wouldn’t have cheered them on under any circumstances,” he said. “You have this perfect storm of a very condensed legislative calendar, a number of quote unquote must-pass vehicles — from the debt ceiling to storm relief — and they’re in the enviable position of having everything to gain and nothing to lose.”

Breitbart, Bardella said, “exists to provide Trump with who is to blame, and it’s always Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.”

But Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.) said the president’s deal with Democrats raises the possibility that Trump is willing to defy the Freedom Caucus, right as they’re preparing to ramp up their demands.

“He showed the Freedom Caucus that he doesn’t have to cater to them and won’t cater to them when it comes to the debt ceiling and how it all plays out — that sets them back,” King said. “They weren’t elected to run the country and they can’t be going on suicide missions. Yet they continue to do that because a lot of them live in silos, these echo chambers where they can have their own way.”

Still, should conservative lawmakers ultimately turn their ire on their party’s leadership and rebel against Ryan, they could further imperil Trump’s stalled legislative goals.

“I can’t imagine anything more counterproductive to Republicans’ shared vision of conservative reform,” said Michael Steel, who served as press secretary to former House speaker John A. Boehner. “There is no imaginable scenario where anyone other than Paul Ryan could get the voters necessary to be speaker of the House.”

[The Daily 202: Trump’s triangulation shows what might have been]

As speaker, Ryan has built strong relationships with his party’s members on all sides of the House, who see him as a stable presence and appreciate his willingness to step in as speaker after Boehner resigned two years ago.

He remains close to House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.). McCarthy has long ties to Ryan that go back to their shared public profile as “young guns” during former president Barack Obama’s administration and as allies in the emerging Republican leadership.

Some frustrated House Republicans have nonetheless been mapping out hypothetical options should Ryan be pressured to resign, including demands for more conservative voices to hold leadership posts and possibly drafting an outside political figure.

Two preferred options for speaker, according to the people familiar with the discussions, are elevating McCarthy or Scalise, who is still recovering from gunshot wounds after an assailant opened fire on a Republican congressional baseball practice in June. Conservative lawmakers have privately said they would only consider McCarthy and Scalise, both current members of leadership who are close with Ryan, if they were able to install one of their own members as a No. 2 — someone like Meadows or Jordan, or one of their allies.

Someone close to McCarthy described the idea that the majority leader would replace Ryan in a conservative revolt as “nonsense.”

Meadows and Bannon have also discussed far less plausible options, such as replacing Ryan with Gingrich or Santorum.

When reached earlier this week by phone, Gingrich laughed at the possibility of returning as speaker. But he acknowledged that some House Republicans have “vented” to him over the course of the past year.

“It would be a joke to have anyone not serving in the House or who’s familiar with the members to lead the body,” he said. “That’s antithetical to what it means to be speaker and I know what it takes to be speaker.” 

Similarly, when reached by phone Wednesday, Santorum said: “To be honest with you, I don’t really know anything about it. I don’t really have any comment.”

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