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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.
Wait, so how’d McCarthy manage to cock up the support of his own team?
I wasn’t really clear on why choosing a speaker was so hard in the first place, to be honest.
Because the Republican majority is thin, and contains both people who are almost Democrats, full on Tea Partiers, and Full on MAGAs. Given his tiny majority and discordant caucus McCarthy has been possibly the most effective speaker of the last 25 years, adjusting for degree of difficulty. This is Gaetz taking home the ball because he only won 11-10 instead of 11-0 and saying he was fouled every play.
I'm struggling to find a single person who was less effective than McCarthy. The people above created and continued the dictator speaker era. In order to win the speakership, McCarthy conceded the speaker dictator era (perhaps ending it going forward) by making promises he didn't intend on keeping, strung his caucus along for 7 months as he avoided keeping those promises, and then lost his speakership the first time he tried to use his power to lean on his caucus.
I'm struggling to figure out how anyone has a positive view of Kevin McCarthy other than as the Ticketmaster of politics whereby your forgettable GOP congressmen can have McCarthy take the heat for unpopular programs instead of forcing an indiv vote which could be embarrassing for them, e.g., on Ukraine war funding.
McCarthy and the rest of GOP leadership made a clear decision during the last election cycle that they wanted a slight majority or minority which they could control which included them specifically and purposefully gimping their own party candidates across the country. GOP leadership got what they want except ~10-20 GOP Congressmen who made it through the gimp process weren't willing to go along with it. Giving McCarthy a pass for a situation he helped create is silly and even if he didn't help create it, he was a laughably ineffective speaker who lasted 7 months and lost as soon as he leaned on his speakership to bludgeon the people he lied to to support him.
His last dumb political move was thinking Democrats were going to save him because he kowtowed to their spending wants to avoid shutdown, hitting the cooperate button as Democrats continue to slam defect, which is a fitting microcosm of his entire political career.
McCarthy did not ask Democrats to save him and was aware in advance they almost certainly would not. McCarthy wanted to avoid a shutdown so he worked with Democrats to do that. McCarthy's issues are representative of the split within the GOP and nothing to do with Democrats hitting defect.
Whether you count the Freedom Caucus as hitting defect against the GOP by forcing outsized limitations (based upon how many of them there are) upon McCarthy to get him chosen, or McCarthy hitting defect against them because he did not go along with the agreements he made, none of it has anything to do with Democrats.
rumor was this was a floated possibility and discussion by McCarthy and Dem leadership in negotiation for the CR; you don't have privy information to closed-door negotiations and I'm relying on rumor, but you don't actually know what you're asserting
and even if that didn't happen; so your claim is that McCarthy and Democrats hitting cooperate button has something to do with Democrats, but then the foreseeable and threatened next vote on the floor to vacate McCarthy which Democrats refused to do anything about despite it being caused exactly by the previous vote to cooperate has nothing to do with Democrats because the vacate vote is caused by McCarthy's failure to keep his promises to his caucus? in a legislature with two major factions?
okay, well, we'll just have to disagree about that
You misunderstand. The Democrat's propping up McCarthy would have doomed him. He knew that, he said he would win with support from his own side or not at all. Having to be propped up by your opposition is political suicide when your whole job is wrangling your party. You don't get into his position without being a decent politician and this is basic politics. I think he probably could have bargained with Democrat's to not vote for vacating in exchange for the CR bill. But his public comments thereafter indicated that he did not, and that he understood why that would have been a bad idea. Some quotes from McCarthy
“They haven’t asked for anything. I’m not going to provide anything,”
“Hakeem Jeffries and I have a good relationship,” McCarthy said. “That doesn’t mean they’re going to vote for me. I understand where the Democrats are. I’m not asking for any special deal or anything else.”
and from Gaetz which illustrates why getting support from Democrats would have doomed McCarthy either way:
“I have enough Republicans where at this point next week, one of two things will happen. Kevin McCarthy won’t be the speaker of the House, or he’ll be the speaker of the House working at the pleasure of the Democrats. And I’m at peace with either result, because the American people deserve to know who governs them,” he told CNN’s Manu Raju.
I am going off what was said, plus what an understanding of politics tells me was his best option, and both of those align. If you want to put rumor over that, you certainly can.
So like passing Ukraine funding bill and the CR? edit:
Both of whichthe first did not have majority of the majority support and McCarthy relied on Democrat support to get both things passed. And you're right, it did doom him. This is him hitting "cooperate" button which lead to the vacate vote and Democrats not cooperating.You misunderstand me. I do not think McCarthy is bad at politics; I think McCarthy is very good at politics. I think he would have been a more effective speaker than any GOP Speaker since Gingrich if only his dumb behavior and speakership designs didn't lead him to push campaigns and money in ways which lead to a tiny majority in the House. McCarthy is an incredibly effective fundraiser and he used that skill to shape the caucus in a way to get him speakership. Unfortunately for him and the NRRC, their games they played to gimp candidates they didn't like in winnable races while pushing stooges in races which were a stretch like Maine 1, not to mention patently idiotic behavior by the GOP in the months leading up to the 2022 election caused by the Democrat unpopularity, drove down their own voter motivation so they only barely won a slight majority despite having better metrics to do far better than that than any environment in a decade.
I'll be honest. I do not believe a single thing which comes out of McCarthy's mouth because he has a long history of these sorts of comments about backdoor negotiations which were lies.
well, you have a quote from McCarthy which you accept as true (I don't) and one from Matt Gaetz which could support both of our opinions
so yeah, I'll take my rumor over what comes out of McCarthy's mouth about backdoor dealings
The issue is the rumor would require McCarthy to be a bad politician. Believe me, there is no-one who trusts politicians words less than me (I've worked with a lot of them,). But the good ones don't lie without cause. Here his words support what his best course of action was, so probably he wasn't lying, if we think he was a good politician. Indeed I think he is a good enough politician that he could have got concessions from the Democrats had he wanted, which is another piece of evidence (but not proof) that he was probably pursuing his best and only real option.
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This is silly. A small majority is much harder to control than a big one. With a small majority your dozen most strong-headed members have a lot of leverage (as we've just seen), while with a big majority you can afford a few defections and it's no big deal. Plus the party leadership gets the credit and authority of having delivered a big majority.
except when you think you're going to get 240+ seats which gives you seats you can sacrifice to beat back the MAGA insurgency
what did the GOP do leading up to the 2022 midterm with great poll numbers? Well, they passed gun control and talked about illegal amnesty, both topics which will necessarily drive down turnout numbers
and I agree it was a stupid move, I called it out in the other place while it was happening a year ago, but it's the move they went with and a bunch of examples I can remember off the top of my head to support it (joe kent, john gibbs, jr majewski, david giglio, and more) and the fact it blew up in their faces is funny; blaming Gaetz/Trump candidates for losses when the Party picked the vast majority slate of candidates, attacked their own candidates, picked the strategy, talking points, and consultants, and conditioned money on accepting it, refused to support them in winnable races anyway while blowing silly amounts of money on Party candidates in losing racing, is simply silly
party leadership wants to maintain party leadership; empowering insurgency candidates doesn't preserve party leadership with easy examples of this being the Tea Party which took down Boehner
you think of the GOP leadership as people who want to get things done, but they don't, they're roaches who want to survive and maintain their power (even if it means the respectable loser opposition) and strong majorities mean they are expected to deliver on promises and their excuses are harder to believe (especially given they don't actually want to do most of the things they tell their voters they want to do)
believe it or not, 60 insurgent candidates in a 245 caucus is far worse for the people in party leadership than 10 in a slight majority, despite it looking like a big show circus when Leadership attempts a crunchdown after stringing them along for 7 months
it's far harder to make a stand with a small group of 8 people than with a larger group of people, despite you think they have individual power outsized their numbers, because it's easier to media blitz them, shame them, ostracize them, or buy them off
the way you think things work in politics simply isn't the way it works
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None of those people could have become speaker at all given McCarthy's tiny majority and rebellious faction within it. Just for starters, no Democrat leader has ever faced real opposition intra-party in my lifetime. Second, Boehner and Ryan didn't get much done, even with larger majorities and more favorable overall situations. McCarthy was basically a head football coach at Syracuse going 8-4/7-5, which is amazing.
I also disagree with your idea of what GOP leadership wanted. This "gimping" was done by Trump and the DNC, not anyone McCarthy aligned. First. McCarthy wasn't a shoo in for the speakership. He was a front runner, for sure, but would never have liked such a small majority. The majority is small, basically against his wishes, because a lot of Trump/Gaetz-aligned candidates lost. It is best to think of what just happened in a non-US context. What happened was that there were 3 parties: 1) The Democrat Party; 2 The Republican Party; 3) The Gaetz Party. The Gaetz party chose, in this leadership election, to be team Democrat.
Sure, I agree that McCarthy probably should have anticipated the backstab by Democrats, but that doesn't make it not a backstab. He probably was getting backstabbed by someone this time around no matter what. Either it was Gaetzers or the Romney/Cheneys he was gonna get backstabbed. Such is the problem of running a coalition party without full media hegemony.
every speaker for a very long time has dealt with "rebellious factions" within their caucus, from tea partiers to new dems
Nancy Pelosi had the votes for speaker in 2019 without 10 Democrat members, so the claim she wouldn't have managed it in a similar situation to McCarthy falls flat, and it would have required fewer concessions to boot with easy examples to support that claim being later legislative fights where she got people who allegedly opposed her or her agenda to embarrass themselves with individual "present" votes because she wanted them to.
real opposition defined by what? the fact that the speaker wasn't vacated? this is a chicken-egg problem where I will claim they didn't face "rea" opposition because they were effective and you will claim there wasn't a "real opposition" to begin with
what did McCarthy accomplish? what are his 8 wins and 4 losses? I would bet most of these "wins" you can think of weren't Kevin but the part of the caucus you claim is on "team democrat" holding his feet to the fire to deliver from committees, to subpoenas, to indiv personal appointments, to some individual bills, and more
he stuck around promising individual Congressmen more aggressive investigations, subpoenas, individual bills brought to the floor, and more, and he never delivered or only delivered crumbs, and as the anger and opposition mounted he attempted a crunch-down media blitz with aligned media mouthpieces and that failed
he became speaker by making promises he didn't intend to keep, lying to a bunch of people, stuck around for 7 months stringing them along, and it all came crashing down as he attempted to force his caucus into a CR which failed (something he promised he wouldn't do) so he teamed up with Democrats to pass a CR (something he promised he wouldn't do) over objections of his own caucus
and then he relied on Democrats to save him from pissed off members of his own caucus
and you think this makes McCarthy the most effective speaker of the last 25 years (difficulty adjusted)? this isn't supportable
worse, your attempted portrayal of this is Gaetz sided with team Democrat? this isn't supportable
I agree McCarthy likely didn't want a majority which was this slim, but it's the result of his and the Party's behavior:
lots of candidates lost, it wasn't something which was limited to "Trump/Gaetz-alligned" candidates; candidates without trump endorsements but Party endorsements did worse
or are you trying to claim McCarthy isn't a part of this Party leadership who made these calls? McCarthy controls the money because he's the one who raised it and uses that money to control the Party in the House
unfortunately, I suspect out beliefs about basic facts of what has happened over the last few years in this area may be too different to have a productive dialogue without quite a bit of effort on both our parts
There has not been a 8 vote defection by democrats on any important vote in the house in a decade at least.
They voted together on one of the most important questions of the 2 year term.
yeah, that's the point
you claim this is because there is no real opposition, I claim because the speaker was more effective
there is no articulated substance to your opinion about McCarthy or even a single note of any of his accomplishments, so there really isn't a dialogue to have there
You really think Pelosi is more effective as opposed to McCarthy being less because???
Boehner and Ryan were also mysteriously less effective than their contemporaries. Its almost like there is a pattern. Perhaps its just Pelosi is the GOAT. I think its much more likely that Democrats are easier to govern.
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