House Republicans selected Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) on Tuesday night to be their fourth nominee for speaker in the three weeks since Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) was voted out of the role.

Johnson, who is the vice chairman of the House Republican Conference, secured victory on Capitol Hill after House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) dropped out as the third nominee — a designation Emmer held for roughly four hours — becoming the third unsuccessful GOP pick joining House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) and Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH).

The next House floor vote could happen as early as Wednesday, as Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry (R-NC) gaveled the chamber out until noon. Because Republicans have a narrow majority in the House, Johnson can only afford to lose a handful of GOP votes to win the speakership if all Democrats oppose his bid. So far, Democrats have rallied behind their nominee, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY).

In a whirlwind series of events on Tuesday, Emmer won the GOP nomination in the afternoon, but it took several votes. He defeated Johnson 117-97 in the fifth and final ballot. Afterward, roughly two dozen Republicans opposed Emmer in a roll call vote to gauge how much support he would have in a House floor vote.

Former President Donald Trump, the GOP frontrunner in the 2024 presidential race, then chimed in on his Truth Social platform to call Emmer a “RINO” — or Republican in name only — and encouraged members not to back him. Though he tried to flip holdouts, Emmer ended up dropping out during a meeting with the GOP conference.

After a new candidate forum in the early evening, the House GOP held a fresh round of votes for the nomination. The declared candidates included Reps. Johnson, Byron Donalds (R-FL), Chuck Fleischmann (R-TN), and Mark Green (R-TN). A fifth contender, Rep. Roger Williams (R-TX), announced a late entry after the candidate forum. Yet another competitor, Rep. Kevin Hern (R-OK), dropped out and endorsed Johnson before voting got underway.

Johnson prevailed in the third round over Donalds, the only remaining declared candidate by that point, with 128 votes. Attendance was lower than it was for the votes earlier in the day. More than 40 members voted for McCarthy in the final ballot while Donalds got 29 votes.

If the GOP continues to struggle with getting a nominee elected as the new speaker, some other ideas have been floated to chart a way forward. One of them, as reported by NBC News, was McCarthy proposing a plan to be reinstalled as speaker and have Jordan come on as assistant speaker.

A candidate needs 217 votes or a simple majority to win the speakership. Jordan, the only GOP nominee so far this month to get to a House floor vote, got as high as 200 votes while Jeffries got up to 212. In remarks after being nominated and a roll call vote to gauge his chances of winning on the House floor, Johnson said the GOP conference is “united” and “ready to govern.”

GOP speaker nominee @RepMikeJohnson: "Democracy is messy sometimes, but it is our system. This conference that you see, this House Republican majority, is united." pic.twitter.com/YBuG2esWd4

— CSPAN (@cspan) October 25, 2023

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When Johnson first announced his candidacy over the weekend, he said a speaker should strive to “restore trust,” “advance a comprehensive policy agenda,” “promote individual members,” “engage members,” “effectively message,” “build and utilize external coalitions,” and “develop and grow our majority.” He also emphasized, “We all agree the urgency of this hour demands a specific plan and bold, decisive action.”

The U.S. Intelligence Community told reporters on Tuesday night that they now have “high confidence” that the explosion near a hospital in Gaza last week was caused by a rocket fired by Palestinian terrorists that suffered catastrophic engine failure and disintegrated as it fell to the ground.

Speaking with reporters on Tuesday, officials from America’s spy agencies said that contrary to claims made by the media, Democrats, and the Palestinians, the explosion was not caused by any Israeli munitions.

“We assess with high confidence that Israel was not responsible for the explosion at the hospital and that Palestinian militants were responsible,” one intelligence official told reporters. “We assess with low confidence that Palestine Islamic Jihad was responsible for launching the rocket that landed on the hospital.”

The explosion in the parking lot caused “no observable damage to the main hospital building,” the report said, which is consistent with the type of smaller rocket that Palestinian terrorists typically fire vs. an aerial bomb or artillery shell fired by the Israelis.

“The damage at the hospital is consistent with what we would expect to see from a rocket and inconsistent with the larger craters and broader blast effects that we would expect to see … from an air dropped munition or an artillery round,” the official added.

U.S. officials said that, like Israel, they also intercepted communications from suspected Hamas terrorists that indicated that Palestinian Islamic Jihad was responsible for launching the rocket.

The officials said that the communications the U.S. intercepted were different than the communications that Israel intercepted and later released publicly that show two Hamas terrorists blaming Palestine Islamic Jihad for the explosion.

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Based on the collected intelligence, “our conclusion is that there was a catastrophic motor failure that likely occurred which separated the motor and the warhead,” the official said. “The warhead landed in the hospital compound and that was the second explosion and a much bigger one.”

The official said that there was no indication that Israel shot the rocket down with the Iron Dome. Israel does not fire interceptors from the Iron Dome over Gaza for this exact reason.

The official also gave credence to various reports that have been published, including from Israel’s military, that many of the rockets that Palestinian terrorists fire end up malfunctioning and landing inside Gaza.

“The failure rate for these domestically produced rockets is pretty high,” the official said. “There are a lot of incidents in which they don’t make it out of Gaza. They land in the sea, they fail to reach their targets.”