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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.
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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