As a side note, Paul Ryan still needs 18 additional votes to ensure his new role as Speaker Of The House. 

Republicans on Wednesday rallied behind Rep. Paul Ryan to be the next Speaker of the House, declaring him the best candidate to turn the page and unify a fractured GOP conference.

Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican and the 2012 vice presidential nominee, easily defeated his only rival for the top job, GOP Rep. Daniel Webster, a former Speaker in the Florida statehouse.

Ryan routed Webster in a 200-43 vote during a closed-door conference meeting in the cavernous Ways and Means hearing room where Ryan now presides as committee chairman. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) received one vote, as did Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.).

Ryan will need 218 votes to be elected Speaker on the House floor. He is expected to receive more GOP votes now that he has won the conference election.

Boehner in last year’s election led his party to the largest House majority in generations, but he faced an uprising this fall from conservatives who threatened to oust him from power.

For now, Ryan has support from most of the 40 members of the far-right Freedom Caucus, but he’ll have to wrestle with the same conservative forces that pushed out his predecessor and scuttled McCarthy’s own bid for the Speakership.

Wednesday’s internal vote came just hours after Ryan announced he would back a sweeping two-year deal that raises spending caps and the debt ceiling. Conservatives had urged him to oppose the pact because the White House, Boehner and other top congressional leaders negotiated it behind closed doors.

But the agreement eliminates the possibility of a government shutdown or debt default through the 2016 elections. In a statement, Ryan said it gives Republicans a chance to “wipe the slate clean.”

House Republicans are eager for a fresh start after the turmoil that defined the Boehner era.

As he’s wooed his colleagues the past week, Ryan has said he’s open to changes to internal rules and procedure that would give rank-and-file members more power to decide things like which bills come to the floor and who should serve on which committees. Last Friday, he told conservatives leaders that, unlike Boehner, he would not seek retribution against Republicans who buck GOP leadership.

In a private candidates’ forum Wednesday morning, Ryan told colleagues he wouldn’t operate as “Caesar,” gesturing with a thumbs-up and a thumbs down — reenacting a scene from the action flick “Gladiator.”

“He said, ‘I don’t plan to be Caesar,’ deciding the fate of everything from the Speaker’s office, calling all the shots,” said Rep. Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.), a Freedom Caucus leader who is backing Ryan.

Ryan’s only competition for the job came from Webster, who received a dozen votes in his challenge to Boehner in the Speaker’s race in January. But Webster rubbed some supporters the wrong way when he gave a short speech at the Wednesday forum, then refused to take questions and bolted out the door to attend another engagement.

One former Webster supporter said the candidate sent a fundraising email to his wife, explaining that he’s running for Speaker and imploring her to donate money.

“He won’t ask for my vote but he’s asking for money,” the GOP lawmaker quipped.

By contrast, Ryan stayed at the candidate’s forum for more than an hour, fielding questions from dozens of his colleagues until they had nothing left to ask. Some pressed him to explain his support for the bipartisan budget deal, said lawmakers who attended the event.

“He’s supporting the budget because he doesn’t want to have these cliffs or crises,” said freshman Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-Va.), who worked on the Romney-Ryan presidential campaign in 2012. Via: The Hill

But what about Paul Ryan’s support for illegal aliens?

Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) endorsement of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) for Speaker of the House has drawn new attention to Ryan’s two-decade history of pushing for open borders immigration policies. A previously little noticed 2013 video of Ryan and Gutierrez stumping for Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) amnesty bill—in which the two make a candid pitch for unlimited immigration—shows just how far Ryan is willing to go to push for open borders policies.

In the wide-ranging 53 minute video, which took place in Chicago, both Gutierrez and Ryan outline their shared plan for adopting open borders: that is, a national policy of allowing companies to bring in and hire as many foreign workers as they would like. This “free movement” of people across national boundaries is the centerpiece of the open borders ideology to which Ryan has devoted much of his career.

The video is entitled: “Rep. Paul Ryan and Rep. Luis Gutierrez Push For Immigration Reform.” The two Congressional partners lay out an immigration plan that is far more radical in scope than many would have imagined, and absent from virtually all major media coverage of the Ryan speakership push. The video gives fresh insight into what legislation Paul Ryan would advance— and what legislation he would block—if given the Speaker’s gavel.

In the video, Ryan begins by adopting a left-wing narrative about GOP voters and suggesting that their opposition to mass migration is fueled by “ignorance.” Ryan rejects the idea that America is “a country”— i.e. a land with a fixed border and heritage—but instead an “idea” since ideas don’t have borders.

Ryan says:

[America] is not just a country. America is an idea. It’s an idea that people from all over the world to aspire to achieve… There is no other economic system, no other immigration system that has done more to lift people out of poverty than the American free enterprise system, and American immigration system that we have here. That’s what makes us proud. So the question is: what do we do to restore this? […] We’ve had plenty of waves of immigration that have always been met with resistance in the past—the Irish wave is just but one of them. Each wave is met with some ignorance, is met with some resistance.

Ryan appears to be taking a page from his mentor Jack Kemp, who— as Ann Coulter has written— had a habit of smearing blue-collar voters of his own party if they opposed his expansionist agenda. via: Breitbart News