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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.
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 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.
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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