History shows bid to oust Mccarthy won’t be easy
WASHINGTON — “How would you be different as speaker, compared to Mr. Boehner?” a reporter asked then-house Majority Leader Kevin Mccarthy in September 2015 as the California Republican pursued, and eventually gave up, his first attempt at the speakership.
Mccarthy laughed while standing next to outgoing Speaker John Boehner — who had just stepped down after facing a threat of removal — and joked that he was from a different generation and wouldn’t be as tan.
Eight years later, Mccarthy is finding that there are fewer differences between them as he faces a conservative revolt against his speakership.
“If somebody wants to remove (me) because I want to be the adult in the room, go ahead and try,” Mccarthy told reporters Saturday.
And his critics, namely Rep. Matt Gaetz, plan to do just that. On Monday, the far-right Republican from Florida threatened to use a procedural tool — called a motion to vacate — to try and strip Mccarthy of his office sometime this week.
In a speech on the House floor, Gaetz demanded Mccarthy disclose the details of a supposed deal with the White House to bring forward legislation to help fund the war in Ukraine after the speaker relied on Democrats to provide the necessary votes to fund the government.
“It is becoming increasingly clear who the speaker of the House already works for and it’s not the Republican Conference,” Gaetz said in his speech Monday.
The rules of the House allow for any single lawmaker — Democrat or Republican — to make a “motion to vacate the chair,” essentially an attempt to oust the speaker from that leadership post through a privileged resolution.
It’s a rare and strong procedural tool that has only been used twice in the past century.
No speaker has ever been removed from office through a motion to vacate.
If the resolution came to the floor for a vote, it would take a simple majority of the House — 218 votes, when no seats are vacant — to remove the speaker.
Gaetz, a member of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, has been threatening to file the resolution to remove him from the dais ever since Mccarthy was nominated speaker by a majority of the conference earlier this year.
“This will all be torpedoed by one person who wants to put a motion to vacate for personal, political reasons, and undermine the will of the conference and the American people, who elected a Republican majority to govern,” Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., a defender of Mccarthy, said Sunday on ABC.
Gaetz and other critics of Mccarthy say he has failed to be the conservative leader the party needs. They have railed against his deal with the White House over raising the debt limit earlier this year and have demanded the House slash spending levels to new lows. The group has also made sweeping demands to reimagine the U.S. government, which they criticize as “woke and weaponized.”
Gaetz has been speaking to House Democrats from across the ideological spectrum in recent weeks trying to assess what kind of support, if any, he would have from those across the aisle if he were to file his motion and it came to the floor.
“The one thing I agree with my Democrat colleagues on is that for the last eight months, this House has been poorly led and we own that and we have to do something about it,” Gaetz said on the floor last week. “And you know what? My Democrat colleagues will have an opportunity to do something about that, too. And we will see if they bail out our failed speaker.”