{"id":67627,"date":"2021-02-10T22:30:00","date_gmt":"2021-02-11T07:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/breaking-deadlock-ends-state-house-selects-a-speaker\/"},"modified":"2021-02-11T17:11:25","modified_gmt":"2021-02-12T02:11:25","slug":"breaking-deadlock-ends-state-house-selects-a-speaker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/breaking-deadlock-ends-state-house-selects-a-speaker\/","title":{"rendered":"Update: Deadlock ends, state House selects a speaker"},"content":{"rendered":"

This story has been updated to include new information.<\/em><\/ins><\/p>\n

After 18 days of deadlock, the Alaska House of Representatives elected Rep. Louise Stutes, R-Kodiak, as speaker of the house.<\/p>\n

Stutes is a Republican, but previously caucused with a bipartisan majority. Prior to the session’s start, she had committed to doing the same this year. She had been the lone Republican in a group of 16 Democrats and three independents who’ve been referring to themselves as the House Coalition.<\/p>\n

Taking the speaker’s seat, Stutes said she looked forward to bring the body together.<\/p>\n

“We all need to walk down the same side of the street,” she said. “Thank you for the confidence you’ve put in me.”<\/p>\n

The House adjourned until Friday morning. The next step in organization is committee assignments.<\/p>\n

Stutes was voted into the presiding officer role by a single vote.<\/p>\n

Rep. Kelly Merrick, R-Eagle River, cast her vote for Stutes breaking what had been a 20-20 deadlock. Many votes in the House require only a simple majority but many, including appropriations, require higher thresholds.<\/p>\n

[Senators wait ‘patiently’<\/a>]<\/ins><\/p>\n

In a statement shared shortly after the vote, Merrick said she was not joining the 20-member, bipartisan House Coalition but was frustrated by the deadlock. Stutes, a fellow Republican, has worked across party lines in the Legislature for years, Merrick said.<\/p>\n

“I have been frustrated by taking the same fruitless votes day after day and I felt we could no longer afford to delay extending the Governor’s emergency disaster declaration, crafting a fiscally conservative budget, and passing the construction jobs bill,” Merrick said.<\/p>\n

• Contact reporter Peter Segall at psegall@juneauempire.com. Follow him on Twitter at @SegallJnuEmpire.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

17 days of deadlock. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":531,"featured_media":67648,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":9,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,4],"tags":[474,730,230],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-67627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-home","category-news","tag-alaska-house-of-representatives","tag-breaking-news","tag-state-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/531"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67627"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67627\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67627"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=67627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}