I'm one of these people that you know you rip the rear of your mirror off you know you don't look back you you know you deal with what's in front of you because you don't have time to look back you learn from everything you've done.

House majority leader Steve Scalise has had one of the most unusual careers in Congress ever since he won a special election in 2008 to replace Louisiana's Bobby Jindall.

It's been characterized by long stretches of relative anonymity, punctuated by a series of life-altering

events. In 2014, Scalise was quickly catapulted into the position of

GOP Whip after Er Cantor was defeated in a shocking upset that reordered the House

GOP. In 2017, knocking upset that reordered the House GOP.

In 2017, Scalise was almost killed by a lunatic gunman

while out of baseball practice for the annual congressional game.

Earlier this year, Scalise was diagnosed with a blood cancer for which he's been receiving

chemotherapy.

And in October, when Kevin McCarthy was overthrown, Scalise, the number two Republican, thought it was only natural that his colleagues would want him to move up around.

But they didn't. At least not enough of them.

Scalese won an internal conference vote, but he abandoned his quest for

speaker before it ever got to the floor for a final vote.

Look, through a lot of these challenges I've been through.

I mean, I know what's important in life, but also I respect my colleagues and I didn't want to put them through, you know, 15 rounds of votes on the House floor and that sort of thing.

So what happened? Well, there was his toxic relationship with Kevin McCarthy, the backstabbing of a fellow member from Louisiana,

the Trump factor, and then at the end of the process, the man Republicans promoted, Scalese's new boss, was Mike Johnson, a junior member of his home state delegation.

I'm going to ask Steve Scalese about all of that and a lot more, including impeachment, why he'll

vote against expelling George Santos, and how Mike Johnson is trying to use immigration

to tame hardliners when it comes to the spending

showdown with Joe Biden. I'm Ryan Liza and this is Playbook Deep Dive. Well going through what you went through after being shot and now dealing with

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