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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’ve been relatively happy with McCarthy. But I support Ukraine funding.
We do need to cut federal spending. The current levels are harming the economy. If we cut federal spending it would cause demand to fall. But that fall is easy for the fed to compensate for by cutting rates. We could go back to the 2010’s economy of big but workable deficits and low rates. Bidenomics has been a disaster.
Also I wish they were doing a better job impeach Biden. (Let’s not relitigate that but personally I believe it’s correct and just).
...
I don't understand how these sentences can be placed so close together.
He only holds the house by a few votes while the other party has the Presidency and Senate.
Government shutdowns have tended to be bad for the party that does them.
Which is to say the Republicans, because if the two sides don't agree, it's always the Republicans who get the blame (because the media decides this).
For as much as this forum has talked about how conservatives need to refuse to cooperate with dems on matters of policy, this seems a bit cheeky. The mean old media is just so biased, the republicans surely had nothing to do with any legislative gridlock.
I mean. Rarely. Whenever Republicans have control of a branch they typically pass financing regular order bills piecemeal, as is supposed to happen, for the majority of departments months in advance. And then the other branches either don't vote on them or promise to veto them until an omnibus/cr is passed. This is why the "shutdown" and "debt ceiling" canards are as such, the Democrats have, over the last 12-15 years, never passed regular spending bills for the subsections of the government. Like, the Republicans could pass a bill for DOD the Dems would vote for (as is supposed to happen), but they just wouldn't put it to a vote, because then they lose the leverage of soldiers not getting paid (which the media would unfairly pin on Republicans) because republicans wouldn't fund 300 billion in solar panels in Toronto.
The focus is on Republicans here because they specifically didn't do that, and the hold up was opposition by the right flank.
This even though ironically the Appropriations Committee passed all 12 bills with full markups and on a bipartisan basis for the first time in forever.
Indeed, but this also indicates a total lack of bipartisanship from Democrats. If there are all 12 passed, and 8 Republican holdouts, a good faith few Dems would go with it. Just like this motion to vacate. McCarthy has shown to be a good faith partner, even if he holds to principles. His reward was the Dems giving him zero good faith in return on the motion to vacate.
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Agree. Two additions.
This is kind of what's going on with Tuberville's hold. He's holding DoD senior officer promotions until the Dems give him a floor vote on the DoD abortion policy. He's stated he'll abide whatever the result of that vote is and lift the hold. The goal, for Tuberville, is to either get the DoD abortion policy changed or, at least, get a bunch of Dems to vote explicitly in favor of keeping it. The one wrinkle is that, to my knowledge, he hasn't offered anything to vote on and has asked the Dems to bring their own policy package, which is kind of weird. The headlines always stop short at, "Republican Senator holds all DoD promotions because he doesn't like abortion." He just want's a vote.
I'd eagerly wager that 99% of Americans cannot accurately describe regular order in either chamber of Congress. Fewer still can give a good outline of the bill-to-law pathway through committee, amendment processes, markups, etc. The procedural realities of Congress make time the precious commodity. There just isn't enough time to do everything. Worse, when you have goofy distractions all of the time, there's frequently not enough remaining to do even the important things correctly (like passing a budget on time). So, you end up with omnibuses,CRs, and generally slipshod work for literally the last 27 years.
But reporting on the complexity of Congressional process doesn't get viewership, and "political reporters" can be technically true in writing headlines like "X opposed Y resulting in Z." I can't begin to enumerate the ways the media has failed since about the 1970s onward, but especially after the internet became ubiquitous. One of the chief failings, however, is in the media's ongoing failure to simply report on the mechanics of government (or, for that matter, economics and business cycles). The default is such overly simplified narratives that they cease to be functionally useful or even complete. What's a narrative structure without functional use? It's a story. It evokes emotion, it pastes a concise arc over a complex situation. Satisfying, but useless and incomplete. If you repeat that for years and years, eventually the audience can only conceive of "information" and "news" within the structure of emotional narrative arcs. Anything outside of that format may serve some other niche purpose, but isn't "news." Reporters have ceased to know what they're talking about, focusing, instead, on knowing what has already been said (knowledge v. narrative). It's a self reinforcing feedback cycle. Today's "news" is an expansion and commentary on yesterday's "news" and an easy to follow narrative line is important.
I like to imagine a headline on NYT/WaPO the reads "Here is a guide to how committee markups work" and then imagine the first comment being "What does this have to do with Congress?"
Imo it's kind of reasonable not to set the precedent that we can hold up the functioning of the government so one guy gets to have a vote on a very tenuously related issue he's into. The Senate has passed a ton of bills the House is never going to look at either, that's just how a divided Congress goes.
Otherwise 100% agreed the boring, procedural stuff and general gov mechanics are super important and I wish they were reported on more.
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“Mine, yours, theirs” asymmetry: “Democrats show admirable solidarity in the face of Republican radicalism,” but “Republicans cause gridlock, refusing to cooperate in a spirit of bipartisanship.”
Tribal bias turns negotiable differences into irreconcilable divides. Each side’s marketing says it is the only side operating in good faith on the side of good, making good decisions for the good of the people. This is why politics is the mind-killer.
for what it's worth i understand how "the media" doesn't mean the exact same thing to our two fine political parties, but it still annoys me that this discussion ignores the existence and popularity of right wing media and pundits. Fox news doesn't frame the discussion this way and i think they count as "the media"
as for mindkilling, i fully agree. more and more i have a hard time wanting to wade into political debate because it legitimately always devolves into arguments i have had since i was 16 years old and there often isnt any objective correct answer.
one of the reasons that i'm pro hypothetical AI overlord is that it would be interesting to see what an "adult" thinks about our sibling squabbling
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It takes two to tango, but somehow only one side ever gets accused of dancing.
More like neither group really wants to dance but one side is happier with the lack of dancing than the other
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