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In the wake of the House of Representatives passing a Continuing Resolution maintaining current funding levels a group of Republicans, led by Matt Gaetz (R-FL), have filed a motion to vacate against Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). This is a motion that, if passed, would remove McCarthy as Chair of the House of Representatives after only nine months on the job. The reporting I'm seeing on Twitter says Democrats are united in supporting the motion, which means only three Republicans would need to join Gaetz for the motion to pass. I believe this would also be the first time in US history the House will have removed a Speaker with a motion to vacate.
What happens after that is anyone's guess. In a literal sense we move back to where we were this January and do another election for Speaker. Presumably Democrats are going to nominate and vote for Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) as they did then. It's not clear who on the Republican side would be a replacement for McCarthy. He still enjoys the support of a strong majority of Republicans, but the Republican majority is so small he needs basically everyone. His getting elected Speaker again would almost certainly need someone who voted to vacate to vote for him to Speaker. I'm skeptical there are promises McCarthy could make to the Republicans voting to oust him that could convince them to support him again. On the other hand I'm not aware of any consensus about who Republicans could be convinced to support except McCarthy. By far the funniest outcome, I think, would be the Republicans who voted to oust McCarthy abstaining in the Speaker vote, letting the Democrats elect Jeffries Speaker.
Vote on the motion is supposed to be held this morning though the House is currently debating other bills. You can watch the House Session on C-SPAN. Will update this post as the news develops.
ETA:
By a vote of 216-210-0 Kevin McCarthy becomes the first Speaker of the United States House of Representatives removed by a motion to vacate.
Vote breakdown by party (based on the vote on the motion to table, C-SPAN roll call doesn't break down by party):
As expected McCarthy retains the support of the vast majority of his own Conference. I think the rule is the House can't do business without a Speaker so I imagine we go directly into elections for Speaker of the House now. Given the multiple days it took to elect McCarthy before I am not confident about any particular path forward from here.
ETA2:
Am hearing online that the Speaker pro tempore (selected by McCarthy when he became Speaker) may be able to function as Speaker indefinitely. They may not have to have an election for Speaker on any particular time table.
What a tremendous backstab by the Democrats, right? McCarthy avoids the shut down only to get ousted by Dems helping out his internal enemies. I'm flabbergasted at the choice of "betray" by the Dems. It makes absolutely clear to any future R speaker with problems on his Right to never ever under any circumstances compromise with the Dems.
This assumes that avoiding the shutdown was some sort of gift to Democrats. It wasn't
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Or alternatively a knife edge house should elect an ultra moderate as speaker who can command control of enough people on the opposite side of the house that restive elements on his own side can't do anything. I'd be in favour of a bunch of moderate republicans supporting Jefferies to punish the republican defectors against McCarthy. The slap in the face Republicans would get for losing control of the house even though they have a majority of members is something the party has desperately needed over the last 7ish years.
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Notably McCarthy has not asked for support from the Democrats. Probably correctly realizing that doing that weakens his position with his own party. If the Democrats want to make things awkward for him, voting for him is exactly the way to do it. He wins this vote, sure, but it's a terrible look for him and he would probably be gone in a month or two.
This is not a backstab, because it is what McCarthy expected to happen. Remember winning the vote is not the only thing at stake here for him. Losing clean is probably preferable to winning due to your opponents voting for you. It would taint him for close to a third of his House brethren.
The Democrats best way to help him is to stay out of it, which means voting against him, so doing what they are expected to do. If any of them do vote for him, that will be the interesting scenario.
The Democrats could have stayed out of it by voting "present", which would have left the discharge position dead by a large majority.
I think Republican representatives would have (correctly in my opinion) have seen that as Democrats helping him out.
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What do you mean? The Democrats helped the Republicans keep the government funded, which is what the majority of the GOP wanted. This is completely separate from an agreement for the Democrats to support a Speaker from the opposite party. McCarthy, like Boehner before him, would certainly never expect that without specific negotiations (which he's said he won't do, at least so far) and no minority party would grant it without significant concessions.
Shutting down the government is bad (according to Dem orthodoxy). McCarthy acted, against the Freedom Caucus jackrabbits working on making themselves ungovernable, to avoid the government shutdown. While I don't think he did so for reasons or in a way that represents a compromise with Democrats, he did act to do so. Democrats should reward that action by keeping him around. By not doing so, they make obvious to the next R Speaker that they should not act to keep the government open.
Shutting down the government is bad according to both parties. "Having a functional government" isn't some kind of concession a generous Speaker can make to the Democrats, it's literally just the majority party's job and was obviously what McCarthy and the majority of the GOP caucus repeatedly said they wanted. They couldn't achieve that, despite all 12 appropriations being fully endorsed by both Republicans and Democrats in the Appropriations Committee, specifically because of rebellion from other Republicans, so Democrats saved them and gave them the votes they needed to pass a CR.
They did this despite the fact that McCarthy had already betrayed them on the agreement he made during the debt ceiling negotiation to keep funding at certain levels, and also broke his public commitment not to launch an impeachment inquiry without a floor vote. Despite all this they still reached across the aisle and helped him anyway, only for him to hold a press conference the very next day blaming them for holding up the spending deal.
Given that he did nothing for them, repeatedly reneged on prior commitments, and even accused them of being the root problem after admitting repeatedly it was the Freedom Caucus, it is a bit rich to accuse them of a tremendous backstab against him.
Forgive me if my tone sounds peeved, I'm just somewhat exhausted listening to friends and family members explain to me how somehow the Democrats are at fault here after one of the more embarassing internal party performances ever seen. The GOP's problem right now is intraparty cohesion and it is simply never going to fix that by blaming squabbles on the other party.
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I suspect the Democrats would say McCarthy hit "defect" first by trying to pass a bunch of spending bills or CRs that departed downward from the spending levels agreed on in the debt limit negotiations earlier this year. It's not like McCarthy passed the clean CR because of loyalty to Dem priorities, it was either CR the Dems would vote for or government shutdown. On the other hand, I'm skeptical whatever Speaker comes out of this mess will be more palatable to Dems than McCarthy.
The whole situation is strange, with the majority's margin as small as it is. I almost wish the US had some mechanism to call snap elections like the UK does.
There was also that whole opening an impeachment inquiry without a house vote, which he claimed he wouldn't do shortly before doing it.
And when that failed to win him the support he needed, after relying on Democrat votes to pass the CR, said the next day the Dems "tried to do everything they could to not let it pass". The latter was apparently played to Democrats in the meeting where they decided to vote against him.
Still, who knows if this works out for them aside from making the Republicans look chaotic for a bit.
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Based on a quick check of the Hellsite Formerly Known as Twitter, they are saying just that, loudly.
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