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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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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):

AyesNaysNV
Republicans82103
Democrats20804

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 guess Gaetz is gambling that (a) if McCarthy is re-elected then he gets a lot of TV time and can grandstand again, which is his favorite activity (it’s unclear what the goal is in this case, he’s too unlikeable to be president and he doesn’t really seem like someone Trump would hire for a good cabinet job) and (b) if abstentions lead to the Dems/Jeffries winning, he won’t face any personal blowback. Gaetz is personally very shady even by Florida politician standards, but I don’t think he intends to spend much more of his career in Washington.

Gaetz is personally very shady even by Florida politician standards

Can you explain, please? Gaetz was never charged in that sex trafficking probe a couple of years ago, and indeed the Justice Department’s main informant was himself sentenced to 11 years in prison for those crimes alleged against Gaetz.

Is that what makes him shady—being accused of a crime and then subsequently cleared of it? Or that the House Ethics Committee is taking another bite at the same apple following his opposition to the House leadership?

Seems more like the uniparty wants people to believe he’s a shady character. We’ll see how the evidence shakes out, rather than innuendo.

Can you explain, please? Gaetz was never charged in that sex trafficking probe a couple of years ago, and indeed the Justice Department’s main informant was himself sentenced to 11 years in prison for those crimes alleged against Gaetz.

Menendez got away with a lot of stuff for a very long time too, the fact that Gaetz hasn’t been charged doesn’t mean a lot. Someone more conspiratorial might say that it’s always better for the ‘deep state’ to have things on those in positions of nominal power than it is for them to immediately push them out of office.

In any case, there are details around the case, specifically the Bahamas (?) trip in question, that suggest to me that it’s very unlikely Gaetz wasn’t involved. The case stalled, allegedly, because two witnesses (almost certainly young escorts) were deemed non credible. This is common in high profile prostitution cases and was part of the reason Epstein got away for so long, so it doesn’t particularly surprise me.

I mean real question- assuming the most lurid details aren’t true, why do we care that much that some escorts he took on vacation happened to be 17 instead of 18? I doubt very much he called the escort agency and asked ‘you got any minors?’, and while it’s reasonable to expect your politicians not to take escorts on vacation and reasonable to go after escort agencies for employing underaged women, it doesn’t seem like it’s a particularly big deal that he(probably unknowingly) got one who was underaged.

I would not let my daughter spend time with Gaetz if I had one, but he’s no Roy Moore. My assumption is that most politicians have mistresses or escorts and if he gets one who lied about her age, it isn’t pedophilia here.

… but he’s no Roy Moore.

This is definitely a tangent, but I haven’t kept up with political scandals. What do you mean? My recollection is that Moore was accused of some things that were really serious and some things that were merely weird; then, when some of the weird accusations were proved, people spoke as if the grave ones were too, mostly without evidence. But I am fully prepared to have missed some developments in the mean time.

While some of the really serious accusations against Roy Moore were never proven, he did admit to having a series of mistresses he knew to be underaged when he was in his thirties.

I agree, I’m just saying that it’s still somewhat shady. Like if I found out my boss went on vacations with 17/18 year old escorts I’d consider it “pretty shady” even if not illegal. Maybe sleazy would have been a better term, in hindsight.

Absolutely. It’s shady, it doesn’t make me like him, but it isn’t child sex trafficking.

If somehow the Democrats ended up in control of the house as a result of this (shutting down among other thing ers the impeachment process) Gaetz would be DOA.

(it’s unclear what the goal is in this case, he’s too unlikeable to be president and he doesn’t really seem like someone Trump would hire for a good cabinet job

I know it shouldn't be my first go-to explanation for a Congressman, but I think it's actually possible that he actually thinks it's bad that our massive deficits come from a budget process that doesn't even follow the basics of a budget process. Now, I'm sure expressing that with such vigor and grandstanding about it has additional motives tied to it, but if I were in his seat and thought the status quo was somewhere in the ballpark of absolutely, ridiculously, beyond-any-reasonable argument fucking preposterous, I would conduct myself as he currently is.

By all means, speculate about Gaetz's ulterior motives, I agree that he seems like a slimy character, but just as a data point, there's at least one person watching him and saying, "yeah, fuck these guys" when he stands up and grandstands.

that our massive deficits come from a budget process that doesn't even follow the basics of a budget process.

Drafting a budget that reflects the terms of the debt ceiling deal and taking it through the legislative process would be following a budget process. This whole row kicked off because Gaetz and the Freedom Caucus didn't want to do that - it isn't clear from the press coverage how much of the issue is that they want even larger cuts than the ones Biden and McCarthy negotiated, and how much is that they want to use the budget process as a lever to change policy on other issues (like the Trump prosecutions and immigration enforcement) rather than to pass a budget that reflects their spending priorities. But in the FY 2024 budget cycle, the reason why the budget isn't the result of a budget process is because the Freedom Caucus don't want it to be.

that's not what was agreed to by McCarthy to win his speakership; he agreed to abandon CRs and Omnibus bills and have appropriations go through the normal process

not "a budget process," but the normal process described in the 1974? law which sets out how budgets will be passed

to win the speakership, McCarthy agreed to move 12 appropriations bills individually which would go through the "normal process" to pass bills

he agreed to give members 72 hours to read bills, he agreed to not put any bill which spends more than $100m to go on the suspension agenda which prohibits open amendment

there is a longer list of procedural changes which the caucus was able to extract out of McCarthy in order for him to get speakership, all of which reduce the power of the speaker and leadership

instead of doing that, McCarthy attempted to slam through a continuing resolution for 45 days, threw all of these procedure changes he promised out the window, had the CR back up to another holiday which would likely result in another omnibus bill and crunch down on his caucus essentially blackmailing them with shutdown

that failed, so he threw some opposition people from his caucus on the group who crafted the CR and they put in some funding they had whined about and attempted to pass it; that failed, so he joined Democrats in passing the CR over the objections of his own caucus after violating most of the promises he made to get speakership

as usual, press coverage is garbage with an agenda and you shouldn't rely on it for information about pretty much anything

think it's actually possible that he actually thinks it's bad that our massive deficits come from a budget process that doesn't even follow the basics of a budget process.

Considering he was enthusiastically in favor a tax cut (without attendant spending cuts) that increased the deficit a few years ago, I think we can safely dismiss the possibility that Gaetz is a principled deficit hawk.