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Rep. Matt Gaetz said Sunday he will try to remove House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a fellow Republican, from his leadership position this week after McCarthy relied on Democratic support to pass legislation that avoided a government shutdown.
“Bring it on,” McCarthy responded. “Let’s get over with it.”
Context: Government shutdown averted for now as Congress approves 45-day funding bridge
Gaetz, a longtime McCarthy nemesis, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that McCarthy was in “brazen, material breach” of agreements he made with House Republicans in January when he ran for speaker. As a result, Gaetz said he would be filing a “ motion to vacate the chair,” as new House rules put in place, reportedly as a condition of McCarthy’s securing the speaker’s gavel in January, permit.
From the archives (January 2023): The deal Kevin McCarthy is offering holdout House Republicans in exchange for their speaker votes
McCarthy’s response: “So be it. Bring it on. Let’s get over with it and let’s start governing,” he said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.
Debbie Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, had suggested in a Saturday interview with MSNBC that the House might operate more effectively if the “boil” of a threatened motion to vacate were “lanced.”
No speaker has ever been removed from office through such a move. Procedural votes could be offered to halt the motion or it could trigger a House floor vote on whether McCarthy, a Republican from inland Southern California, should remain speaker.
“I think we need to rip off the Band-Aid,” said Florida’s Gaetz. “I think we need to move on with new leadership that can be trustworthy.”
McCarthy has the support of a large majority of House Republicans, but, because the GOP holds such a slim majority, he might need votes from some Democrats to keep his job.
“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.
Countering that, Rep. Mike Lawler, a first-term Republican from a congressional district in New York carried by President Joe Biden in 2020, spoke of Gaetz’s “diatribe of delusional thinking.”
Lawler told ABC’s “This Week” that Gaetz was acting for “personal, political reasons.”
The current 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.
In January, McCarthy, hoping to appease some on the hard right as he fought to gain their votes for speaker, initially agreed to give as few as five Republican members the ability to initiate a vote to remove him. When that was not good enough for his detractors, he agreed to reduce that threshold to one.
Proponents of allowing a lone lawmaker to file the motion said it promotes accountability. The last use of the motion was in 2015, when then-Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina, a Republican who later became the fourth and final chief of staff during Donald Trump’s four-year White House term, introduced a resolution to declare the speaker’s office vacant.
Two months later, Boehner, an Ohio Republican, said he would be stepping down.
