A leading hardline Republican said Sunday he would move to oust House Speaker Kevin McCarthy for striking a deal with Democrats to avert a US government shutdown without the spending cuts demanded by the right-wing caucus.
“I do intend to file a motion to vacate Speaker McCarthy this week,” Congressman Matt Gaetz told CNN. “I think we need to rip off the Band-Aid.”
Gaetz is a leading figure within a small group of hardline Republican legislators who had brought the government to the brink of shutdown with their refusal to adopt fresh federal funding without deep spending cuts.
The group was furious when McCarthy struck a stopgap deal with Democrats late Saturday to keep the government open for a further 45 days at current spending levels.
“I think we need to move on with new leadership that can be trustworthy,” Gaetz told CNN, while recognizing that Democrats could opt to back McCarthy after he brokered the shutdown compromise.
“The only way Kevin McCarthy is speaker of the House at the end of this coming week is if Democrats bail him out,” Gaetz said. “Now, they probably will.”
Despite the bill’s passage, many Democrats remained enraged at the near-shutdown triggered by the far-right, as well as measures stripped from the final bill.
US President Joe Biden, who signed the measure late Saturday, berated McCarthy and the House Republicans for reneging on spending levels agreed with the White House months ago — a major reason for the shutdown near-miss — and for stripping out support for Ukraine.
Some Democratic lawmakers were already standing their ground in their refusal to help the Republican leader stay in his post.
Progressive lawmaker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told CNN she would “absolutely” vote to oust the speaker, adding that it was “not up to Democrats to save Republicans from themselves.”
McCarthy only barely survived a bruising battle in January involving a record 15 rounds of voting to become the 55th speaker of the House of Representatives.
In order to gain the gavel, he was forced to make concessions to his party’s far-right bloc, including the rule change — which Gaetz is now promising to use — that makes it possible for a single member to call a vote for a new speaker of the House.
McCarthy was left extremely vulnerable to factions in his own party when Republicans won only a razor-thin majority in the House in last November’s midterm elections.
But the speaker remained confident Sunday he would not succumb to a motion to remove him, telling “Face the Nation” on CBS: “I will survive.”
If Matt Gaetz is “upset because he tried to push us in a shutdown and I made sure the government didn’t shut down, then let’s have that fight,” McCarthy said.
In addition to any Democratic support he may be able to muster, pro-McCarthy Republicans will also work to prevent his ouster.
Republican Mike Lawler said the disruption from such a vote would only stymie the work that Congress must now accomplish by mid-November if it hopes to make the next deadline.
Defending the vote to avoid a shutdown, he told ABC’s “This Week” that “the only responsible thing to do was to keep the government open and funded while we complete our work.”
If Congress had failed to keep the government open, the closures would have begun just after midnight (0400 GMT Sunday) and would have delayed salaries for millions of federal employees and military personnel.
The stopgap measure buys legislators time to negotiate full-year spending bills for the rest of fiscal 2024. – Becca MILFELD
