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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.
I was looking it up and I guess this is only the third time a motion to vacate ever happened in history. The last time was kind of similar to this, the right flank, led by Mark Meadows, rebelling against John Boehner in 2015. It was unsuccessful but he ended up resigning anyway.
The first time was in 1910 and the Speaker filed a Motion to Vacate against himself. Basically he was daring unruly representatives to challenge him publicly, and ultimately they fell in line. Couldn't be farther from our present situation.
Goddamn that's a baller move
It's a baller move as long as it works. Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull tried something very similar in 2018, his bluff got called, and he ended up losing his job and looking like a bit of a goose.
It wouldn't be a baller move if there wasn't risk.
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The more things change, the more they stay the same
It should be noted this was long after PP funds were banned from being used for abortions, so moderate Republicans got smeared with trying to cut funding from all the other services PP provided to some several million low-income women. And then as now, Democrats had the Senate so there was a limit to how conservative any viable budget could be.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t those other services mostly things that cultural conservatives don’t have any problem defunding even if it’s still legal to spend government money on them? I was under the impression that PP wildly exaggerated the services it provided and that the remaining ones are either objectionable to cultural conservatives in themselves(sex Ed and some gay stuff and contraceptives) or basically just referrals.
I thought the big one was cancer screening—pap smears and mammograms. Not sure what fraction of money goes to those.
Soriek has actual numbers below, and contraceptives dwarf anything cancer related, and planned parenthood spends twice as much on STD-related stuff as it does on contraception. These are the two largest categories and it’s pretty common for cultural conservatives to oppose government funding for those two things even when it doesn’t go through planned parenthood on the basis of incentivizing promiscuity.
Thanks. Sounds like I was a bit off base.
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Cancer screening doesn't generally have the advertised benefits when we look at all-cause mortality rather than cancer-specific mortality. Here's a fairly recent review of evidence on mammograms specifically. At this point, I'm against government funding of mammograms until someone can demonstrate that it actually improves health outcomes.
Hydro asked if it was mostly "gay stuff and contraceptives," and the answer is no.
I understand that you're in favor of general slashes to most forms of government aid. But I doubt that the opposition to Planned Parenthood stems from principled minarchism.
The linked report is interesting, though. It's a plausible thesis, and the provided meta-analyses don't suggest much of an effect from mammography.
#1 concludes with a 10% overdiagnosis in women 55-69. #2 says 30% in women age 40-49 and 20% in women age 50-59. They're certainly suggestive of a correlation with age. Let's use the conservative figure. For every 7 women who needed the diagnosis, then, 3 didn't. That...doesn't feel terribly wrong to me? And I'd certainly feel comfortable with a 9-to-1 rate.
Anyway, back to the main thrust: all-cause mortality. Much like the trend lines, the author oscillates between emphasizing the lack of statistical significance and the weirdness of seeing a trend line at all. How could the interventions actively kill people sooner? Is there a confounder, where the people who actually get screenings are the ones who are a little unhealthier to start?
So...interesting results. Probably a good reason not to screen under 50 or 55. This is a little more strict than what various governments already suggest.
Though I would hesitate to use this as evidence against cancer screening in general. The paper cites colorectal and cervical cancer as examples where the outcomes really are much better with earlier detection!
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I should be clear I don't really have a dog in the fight, just didn't want people to have the impression that the fight was particularly about abortion.
Out of curiosity I looked at Planned Parenthood's 2021-22 report; sex ed seems to be small compared to the medical services category ($49,200,00 vs $1,052,000 on page 33). I think a lot of the medical services are offered under affiliates but if it's funded through the same source or receives patients from the same centralized pipeline I guess same difference.
The breakdown of medical services is on page 29, for some reason the total is a little smaller here (9,117,154):
Edit: @FarNearEverywhere caught that this is probably number of services provided rather than dollar value per service category. Leaving the breakdowns up in case that's still interesting info.
STI Testing & Treatment: 4,411,825
Contraceptive Services: 2,348,275
Cancer Screenings & Prevention: 470,419
Other Reproductive Health Services (Pregnancy Tests, Prenatal Services, Miscarriage Care): 1,110,247
Abortion Services: 374,155
Other Services (Family Practice Services, Adoption Services, Urinary Tract Infections Treatments): 402,233
Probably a lot of this stuff conservatives consider elective, and cultural conservatives maybe object to contraceptives, but I'm not even sure how substantial that opposition is. Pew suggests only 4% of Americans think contraception is morally wrong and even for Catholics the number is only 13%. I imagine opposition is less to specific services and more just a holistic dislike of Planned Parenthood as an organization for that very public backing of abortion. Personally though I'm kinda surprised what a small portion goes to abortion.
It seems like large majorities of that are either STD prevention or contraception, and cultural conservatives don’t have to be tradcaths to object to spending government money on it. Indeed, it seems pretty common for cultural conservatives, even fairly moderate ones, to oppose non-planned parenthood funding for contraception and STD treatment as ‘incentivizing promiscuity’.
I mean, there's a reason only a few reps made a big deal out of it in 2015 and it never reached a floor vote. Like I said though, I have no dog in the fight, I mainly didn't want non-American readers here who didn't have the Hyde Amendment background to think this was specifically a fight over money going to abortions.
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I mean, it was about abortion. Yes, they weren't allowed to use the money for abortion, but Republicans still very much opposed the money going to them because of all the abortions they do.
Like if the Ku Klux Klan was getting a bunch of federal funding, people wouldn't say that's ok as long as they use their own money to do the actual lynchings.
That is what I said:
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That figure seems very low. Looking at their own website, and taking the lowest cost of an abortion at a PP clinic, that's $600 for a surgical abortion:
How many abortions did they carry out? This site is definitely not a fan of theirs, but it claims from the 2020-21 report that:
So it seems that the 374,155 figure is not the funding but the number of abortions carried out. 374,155 x $600 = €224,493,000.
Somebody check my figures, that seems like a lot of money.
Looking at the report, the figures are on pages 11 and 29. I think the mistake you are making is that the figures on page 29 are services, not money. So for instance, "STI Testing & Treatment 4,411,825" is not dollars, it's the number of tests they carried out/provided (e.g. STI Tests 3,668,031 means they did over 3 million tests for STIs, not that the testing raised $3 million dollars).
If nationwide you're doing around 300,000 abortions annually at an average price of 600 bucks (be that "we take cash or credit cards" or your health insurance pays), then that ain't hay.
Woah, I read that crazy wrong if so, thanks for catching that. Pretty annoying they don't provide dollar breakdowns of the actual services.
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I don't think contraceptives are morally wrong, but I do think using them outside of marriage is morally wrong.
How about handing out contraceptives to people for free, no questions asked, in the hopes that their use will slow the spread of communicable diseases? Is that kosher?
Only if the people are married, to each other, (which sort of makes the contraceptives meaningless for disease prevention).
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