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 Boehner received 216 of 408 votes, with a growing faction of
dissident House Republicans opposing him because they said he had
done too little to cut spending and fight President Barack Obama's
immigration and healthcare policies.
The last time more than 25 House members voted against a candidate
for speaker from their own party was in 1859, according to
congressional historians.
Within hours of the vote, a senior Republican aide said that Florida
Representatives Richard Nugent and Daniel Webster, who had both
opposed Boehner, were stripped of their assignments on the powerful
House Rules Committee.
The number of Republican defectors was more than twice the dozen who
withheld their support from him in an election two years ago,
evidence of the stark party divisions that could make it hard to
pass legislation, including bills to keep government agencies
operating without interruption.
One of the defectors, Representative Walter Jones of North Carolina,
said he was deluged by calls from people urging Boehner's ouster.
Jones, like others, complained of Boehner's handling of a massive
government spending bill in December.
"We didn’t get 72 hours to read it, it was 1,600 pages and spent
$1.1 trillion," Jones said.
 Obama, in a statement wishing Republicans well, said there would be
"pitched battles" with Congress but that there were also "enormous
areas of potential agreement."
Last year's Congress, which was badly gridlocked, has been dubbed
one of the least productive in history.
Boehner's detractors in Tuesday's vote were conservative activists,
some of them junior members, who regularly have voted against House
Republican leadership-backed bills. But they also included
seven-term Representative Steve King of Iowa, who has helped stymie
Boehner's efforts to advance major changes to U.S. immigration laws.
VETO THREAT
Idaho's Raul Labrador, who declined to vote for Boehner in the
speaker's election two years ago, supported him on Tuesday, as did
Tea Party member John Fleming of Louisiana.
"The votes were simply not there to defeat the speaker," Labrador
said in a statement. "I think it is unwise to marginalize yourself
when there is no chance of victory, which was the case today,"
He added that Boehner had asked for his help in moving the House in
a more conservative direction. A tearful Boehner told House members
after the election: "As a speaker, all I ask and frankly expect is
that we disagree without being disagreeable." Boehner is often
overcome by emotion at the start of a new Congress.
In coming weeks, Boehner is expected to face the difficult task of
finding a middle ground on a bill to keep the Department of Homeland
Security operating beyond February when funds run out.
House conservatives want to use that bill to withhold federal funds
for the department's employees to implement Obama’s order easing the
threat of deportation for millions of undocumented residents.
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Such a move would likely draw a veto from Obama, threatening
operations of one of the most important federal agencies in the
post-Sept. 11, 2011 era. Republican Senator Mitch McConnell, who
assumed the Senate majority leader job on Tuesday and has been
hoping to avoid any government shutdown fights this year, could
temper such House legislation and force Boehner’s Republicans to
compromise.
McConnell has influence over the House because the Senate will need
to approve any legislation for it to win final passage.
'SOMEWHAT VICTORIES'
Even some of the most conservative House members also were
expressing the need to ease their hard-line stances.
"It might be that I end up voting for some things that are not clear
victories but they are somewhat victories. But that's what the
legislative process is about,” said Fleming, who helped orchestrate
the 2013 federal government shutdown in a failed attempt to kill
Obamacare.
Republicans still may not be able to achieve a full repeal of
Obama's signature healthcare law, but they are expected to chip away
at it by passing measures to ease requirements for employer
healthcare coverage and repeal an excise tax on medical devices. On
the energy front, the first major bill the Republican-controlled
Senate intends to pass is approval of the Canada-to-Texas Keystone
XL oil pipeline.
In their first vote on Tuesday, the Republicans muscled through a
controversial change to rules for estimating the cost of four major
tax and budget bills in the House, to include revenue from
anticipated growth effects. Democrats decried adoption of so-called
"dynamic scoring" as masking the true costs for tax rate cuts that
Republicans intend to pass this year.
 Another big test of Republican leadership is likely to come by
midyear, when Congress will have to raise the government’s borrowing
authority or risk a credit default. The debt limit fight is always a
hot-button issue for conservatives who oppose more borrowing.
(Additional reporting by Susan Cornwell and Patricia Zengerle;
Editing by Christian Plumb, John Whitesides and Ken Wills)
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