Photo Credit: Martin Falbisoner, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

by Jennifer Shutt, Georgia Recorder [This article first appeared in the Georgia Recorder, republished with permission]

October 3, 2023

WASHINGTON — Dissident Republicans in the U.S. House voted with Democrats on Tuesday to oust Kevin McCarthy as speaker, a historic move that came just nine months after he secured the gavel following days of negotiating with the GOP’s right flank and 15 rounds of voting.

It wasn’t immediately clear after the vote how the House would proceed in the coming days, having entered uncharted territory. No speaker has ever before been removed by the House. North Carolina Rep. Patrick McHenry was named speaker pro tem until the election of a new speaker, and he sent the House into a recess.

The 216-210 vote on a motion to vacate, which Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz filed Monday evening, capped off months of growing dissent among a small group of House Republicans.

Republican Reps. Andy Biggs of Arizona, Ken Buck of Colorado, Tim Burchett of Tennessee, Eli Crane of Arizona, Gaetz, Bob Good of Virginia, Nancy Mace of South Carolina and Matt Rosendale of Montana voted to remove McCarthy.

They also voted against tabling the motion, which took place just before the vote and would have stopped the process from moving forward.

Warren Davidson of Ohio, Cory Mills of Florida and Victoria Spartz of Indiana voted against tabling, but for keeping McCarthy as speaker.

All House Democrats present voted to declare the office of the speaker vacant.

So far, there have only been three instances where a motion to vacate was filed, one in March 1910, one in July 2015 and the one this month.

Only three motions to vacate in history

McCarthy said before the vote that he was calling Gaetz’s bluff, though he appeared to accept he would be ousted as speaker.

“At the end of the day, if you throw a speaker out that has 99% of their conference, that kept the government open and paid the troops — I think we’re in a really bad place for how we’re going to run Congress,” McCarthy said.

The California Republican said he believed his support for passing a bipartisan short-term spending bill on Saturday, preventing a partial government shutdown, was the “right decision.”

“I stand by that decision and at the end of the day, if I have to lose my job over it, so be it,” McCarthy said. “I’ll continue to fight.”

McCarthy excoriated

Gaetz and other hard-line conservatives have publicly rebuked McCarthy for not holding to a private deal he struck with them in January in order to secure the speakership.

The group of GOP lawmakers, some of whom are in the Freedom Caucus, have lamented McCarthy striking an agreement with President Joe Biden in May to avoid a default on the nation’s debt and for relying on Democratic votes to pass the short-term government spending bill.

Gaetz, speaking Monday on the floor, called on McCarthy to detail whether he had brokered a private deal with Biden to hold a vote on legislation that would provide additional aid to Ukraine in its fight against the Russian invasion. He also criticized McCarthy for reportedly adding border security to those talks.

“I get that a lot of folks might disagree with my perspectives on the border or Ukraine,” Gaetz said. “But could we at least agree that no matter how you feel about Ukraine or the Southern border, they each deserve the dignity of their own consideration and should not be rolled together.”

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries released a “Dear Colleague” letter just before the vote announcing House Democrats would vote to vacate the chair.

“Given their unwillingness to break from MAGA extremism in an authentic and comprehensive manner, House Democratic leadership will vote yes on the pending Republican Motion to Vacate the Chair,” Jeffries wrote.

The group of Republican dissenters who voted to remove McCarthy represents a small fraction of the House Republican Conference, many of whom backed McCarthy on the floor Tuesday and defended his record.

GOP supporters: ‘He did the right thing’

“He’s being punished because he did the right thing on Saturday and made sure that the government didn’t shut down, and we bought more time to continue the appropriations process,” GOP Rep.Tom Cole of Oklahoma told reporters.

Cole offered the motion to table on behalf of McCarthy.

In a statement issued before the Tuesday afternoon vote, Georgia GOP Rep. Earl “Buddy” Carter of Pooler said Gaetz and other fellow Republicans pushing for McCarthy’s ouster were more interested in scoring political points than supporting their party’s agenda.

“Today’s vote will show us who is interested in governing and who is interested in self-promotion,” Carter’s statement said. “We should be focused on passing the remaining appropriations bills, the impeachment inquiry into President Biden, securing the border, and delivering on the Commitment to America, not fighting over personal grudges for cheap headlines.

Arkansas GOP Rep. Steve Womack told reporters before the vote the motion to vacate was a distraction and a “fool’s errand.”

Womack, who sits on the Appropriations Committee, said Republicans should focus on clearing all 12 appropriations bills before the new mid-November deadline.

“We just took the country to the brink of a shutdown for the purpose of what? Moving the rest of our appropriation bills,” Womack said. “We need to finish our work, and the only way to do that is to pass the rule and get these bills across the floor and move to the Senate in conference.”

Rep. Dusty Johnson of South Dakota told reporters Gaetz’s push for a motion to vacate showed there are “middle school grudges” against McCarthy.

“I think that Matt (Gaetz) is making a huge error,” Johnson said. “I think America is gonna be less well off because of his efforts. I think chaos has not served this country.”

Republican Rep. Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma told reporters she was skeptical of the motivations some have stated for removing McCarthy as speaker.

“This isn’t about the appropriations process, and don’t be fooled. (Gaetz) wants to talk about the fact that we should have been doing our (appropriations) work in August. Look, it didn’t happen. So now is the time, and instead of focusing on that for the next 43 days, we’re going to be focusing on this,” Bice said.

GOP Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania told reporters that Republicans should focus on clearing legislation to fully fund the government and work on getting aid to Ukraine.

“If we vacate the chair, the government will shut down, our credit rating will go down, interest rates will go up,” Fitzpatrick said. “Ukraine will be victimized and lose that war to Russia. That is what is at stake here.”

Democrats cheer behind closed doors

Democrats huddled behind closed doors for nearly 90 minutes Tuesday morning to plot a path forward and allow members to speak for up to one minute about the motion to vacate. Rounds of applause and some cheering could be heard from the hallway outside the meeting.

Democratic lawmakers said after the meeting that McCarthy hadn’t built trust.

New Hampshire Democratic Rep. Annie Kuster told reporters the party had “unity of purpose” ahead of the vote.

“What has happened that all of you have witnessed and the American people have witnessed is that the current speaker has chosen to cater to a very extreme element that, in my view, it’s sort of a post-truth world,” Kuster said. “I think you can see that within his own caucus, but you can certainly see it in the way he’s treated us and the American people.”

Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal, a Washington state Democrat, told reporters that the House GOP could “wallow in their pigsty of incompetence and inability to govern.”

Jayapal said that Republican infighting about who their speaker should be was not an issue that Democrats felt the need to solve. She also noted that McCarthy has repeatedly broken trust with Democrats, making the party reluctant to help him keep the speakership.

“Nobody trusts Kevin McCarthy, and why should we? He has broken his commitment over and over again,” Jayapal said.

McCarthy, Jayapal said, has made a series of decisions that have eroded any support he would have had from Democrats. Those include his public comments following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by pro-Trump rioters, his decision to walk away from a spending agreement he and Biden brokered earlier this year and his decision to withhold bringing a bill to the floor that would provide additional aid to Ukraine.

“Kevin McCarthy stood on the House floor and said one thing and then talked to Donald Trump and immediately did something else,” Jayapal said. “He has supported the insurrectionist president that enabled January 6 to happen and tried to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power.”

Jeffries, a New York Democrat, told reporters before the vote the party would “continue to put people over politics and to fight to make life better for everyday Americans.”

“From the very beginning that has been our objective and it will continue to be our sole focus,” Jeffries said. “We encourage our Republican colleagues, who claim to be more traditional, to break from the extremists.”

Jeffries said that Democrats were “ready, willing and able to work together with GOP lawmakers.

“But it is on them to join us to move the Congress and the country forward,” Jeffries said.

Rep. Richard Neal, a Massachusetts Democrat, told reporters after the closed-door meeting there wasn’t “a lot of goodwill in that room for Kevin McCarthy.”

“If you’re gonna negotiate, you have to negotiate with somebody you can trust who can actually keep their word,” Neal said. “And there’s not been a lot of evidence that Kevin McCarthy has kept his word along the way.”

Disputes over spending, Ukraine

Just hours before a shutdown would have begun this weekend, Congress approved a short-term bill to fund the government until Nov. 17. The House passed the stopgap measure in a 335-91 vote, with 90 Republicans opposing it. Senators approved the bill 88-9, with nine Republicans opposed.

The deal didn’t include additional funding for Ukraine, though Biden said Sunday that he and McCarthy agreed to find the votes needed to pass a supplemental package with military assistance and humanitarian relief for the war-torn country as it resists further invasion by Russia.

The stopgap funding bill to avert a government shutdown was not the only time McCarthy worked with Democrats to avert financial calamity. In May the speaker brokered a deal with Biden to raise the debt ceiling and keep the U.S. from defaulting on its loans.

The deal, signed into law as the Fiscal Responsibility Act, included agreed-upon spending levels for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1.

McCarthy has been unable to unify his far-right members around the established spending levels during this year’s appropriations process, bringing the federal government within hours of a partial shutdown.

House lawmakers on the far-right of the spectrum have been browbeating McCarthy since before he took the gavel.

McCarthy’s path to the speakership in January took 15 ballots as more than a dozen far-right conservatives blocked him during a four-day stalemate.

The California Republican won on the 15th ballot after several concessions to the ultra-conservative wing of his party, including a change to the motion to vacate that will allow any one member to essentially call for a no-confidence vote on the speaker.

McCarthy also reserved spots on key committees for far-right members and entered a handshake deal with members of the House Freedom Caucus, promising to cut spending levels.

Samantha Dietel and John McCosh contributed to this report.

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