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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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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