Inside the small but growing movement to topple John Boehner

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Is John Boehner about to lose his speaker post?

House set to vote for speaker

This is a rush transcript from "The Kelly File," January 5, 2015. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

MEGYN KELLY, HOST: New details tonight on the small but growing movement to topple John Boehner as speaker of the House. As the new session of Congress begins, House members must vote for their speaker, tomorrow. And while Mr. Boehner will likely win, lawmakers Ted Yoho of Florida and Louie Gohmert of Texas are openly running against him.

Ellison Barber is a writer for the Washington Free Beacon, she joins us.  Ellison, good to see you.

So who exactly, it's just these two guys who want Boehner gone? And how many votes do they have to get?

ELLISON BARBER, WRITER, WASHINGTON FREE BEACON: Right. Well, they're kind of the main ring leaders here. And so far there are nine lawmakers who is publicly said that they are going to vote no for Boehner's nomination as speaker tomorrow. And what I've heard and I spoke to a staffer in one of those nine offices just earlier today, they said that they thought they were going to have around 20 votes or they did right now. They have about 20 votes right now to vote no. A few that may called some surprises. And that is probably what people are expecting, the most they can kind of get is around 20 lawmakers. You had Representative Walter Jones who is a congressman from North Carolina say in an interview over this weekend that he had met with 18 other congressmen kind of about this. The problem is that they need about 30, just under 30 actually force the vote to a second ballot.

KELLY: Yes. The 20 is not going to do it. They need at least 25, 26. If they only have 20, John Boehner is going to be the next speaker of the House.

BARBER: Right.

KELLY: But they say there would be symbolism enforcing this to go to a second vote which apparently has not happened since 1923 -- I looked it up -- 1923 we had 111 million people living in the United States. And I think the price of gas was like 20 cents a gallon.

BARBER: Right. It would be a big deal if they actually did force it to a second ballot. And I think that's certainly something that Boehner's team wants to avoid. And I spoke with staffers in that office as well. They think that they won't actually go to that second ballot. But when I talked about it, they kind of said to me, we feel confident but I also keep thinking to myself, Eric Cantor was very confident the morning of his primary and then we saw kind of what happened there.

So, they're still working hard. They're taking this seriously. And it does seem like you do have, like you said --

KELLY: But he's a conservatives, these are conservatives who think he's a, quote, "RINO" Republican in name only, they don't think he is march to the beat of conservative drum faithfully enough.

BARBER: Right. Exactly. And kind of the complaint that a lot of people in Boehner's office had when I spoke to them is they were frustrated at all when this is all happening now and sort of the process by which this group of conservatives have chosen to do this. They said, look, we had a meeting in our Congress back in November where we voted for this. None of these guys spoke up or proposed alternatives. They said two years ago when they did this Gohmert actually did propose an alternative, he proposed Newt Gingrich. He didn't do that this time.

So, they were sort of frustrated that they didn't do this earlier but then when you speak to the other side, they said, the CRomnibus was really our final straw --

KELLY: Oh, God! Don't say CRomnibus. We've banned that word from our show. Alright, that's it. Now I have to wrap you based on that. Ellison, great to see you.

BARBER: Good to see you.

KELLY: We'll follow it tomorrow.

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