Matt Gaetz plans vote to oust Kevin McCarthy after Speaker avoids shutdown

Republican rebel Matt Gaetz will try to get rid of McCarthy as early as Monday because he joined forces with the opposition in the vote to avoid shutdown.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy faced a direct threat to his leadership a day after crafting a deal to avoid a government shutdown, as his most prominent Republican critic said he would seek to oust him from the post.

The challenge Sunday from Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz (R., Fla.) sets up an unpredictable and fast-paced political fight in the Capitol this week between McCarthy and a band of GOP rebels who have threatened for months to topple him if he brought up legislation that required Democratic Party support to pass. McCarthy, having gotten Democrats to support his short-term funding bill, may need their help again to remain in his post.

“Bring it on,” McCarthy said Sunday on CBS, predicting he would survive the challenge from Gaetz. “If he’s upset because he tried to push us in a shutdown and I made sure government didn’t shut down, then let’s have that fight.”

In stunning weekend developments, McCarthy pushed aside Gaetz and other GOP hard-liners, opting instead to pass bipartisan legislation funding the government through mid-November, with the support of more than half of Republicans and all but one Democrat. The deal excluded any Ukraine aid or border provisions. The coming days could show whether he has shaken up the balance of power sufficiently to sap the hard-liners’ influence or has only served to rile them more.

The fight between McCarthy and his critics is part of a drama playing out in the GOP as a whole as it seeks to define itself and what it stands for heading into the 2024 presidential election.

Matt Gaetz speaks to the press outside the US Capitol in Washington. Picture: AFP.

Gaetz said McCarthy, who made a series of pledges to win the speakership after 15 rounds of voting, broke his word to conservatives by striking the short-term deal. Gaetz was among 20 Republicans who voted against McCarthy as speaker in January. He ultimately voted present to clear the way for McCarthy’s win.

“We need to move on with new leadership that can be trustworthy,” Gaetz said Sunday on CNN in announcing he planned to file a motion to vacate the chair this week. “The one thing everybody has in common is that nobody trusts Kevin McCarthy.”

A handful of hard-right members have suggested they could support ousting McCarthy. On Sunday, Rep. Eli Crane (R., Ariz.) said “Let’s roll!” on social media in response to Gaetz. The number of House Republicans expected to vote with Gaetz could roughly range from six additional dissidents to closer to the 20 holdouts who initially voted against McCarthy for speaker, according to a House GOP lawmaker.

The GOP has a 221-212 margin in the House, meaning McCarthy could fall shy of a majority if he loses more than four members and no Democrats back him.

But many GOP lawmakers are frustrated with Gaetz, whose actions they view as simply a ploy for attention.

” Matt Gaetz is a charlatan,” Rep. Larry Bucshon (R., Ind.) said Sunday on social media. “At least 200 House Rs will be voting to support the Speaker, including me.” The animosity runs deep. McCarthy has charged that Gaetz is making threats to try to influence a continuing probe of Gaetz by the Ethics Committee. Gaetz said that isn’t the case.

Once Gaetz brings up the motion to vacate, the speaker has to schedule it for a vote within two legislative days. McCarthy allies would then likely seek to block it by offering a “motion to table.” At that point, McCarthy allies could fall short of a majority of the full House, currently 217 votes if all current members are present, to sink the proposal. That means Democrats could play a critical role.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.) hasn’t said how the Democratic caucus would respond if McCarthy needed Democratic votes, or even for Democrats to simply vote present, to remain House speaker. A House Democrat said Sunday that there were myriad discussions under way about their strategy and that McCarthy would only be able to secure Democratic support were he to offer them concessions.

Rep. Dean Phillips (D., Minn.) said last week that he believed a number of Democrats could support McCarthy in exchange for concessions. On CNN Sunday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) said she thought it was unlikely that Democrats would come to McCarthy’s rescue, but left the door open.

“I don’t think we give up votes for free,” Ocasio-Cortez said. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) told CNN on Sunday that Democrats should stick together as a caucus, saying, “My advice to my fellow Democrats is simple: follow the leader.”

Some Democrats have poured cold water on helping McCarthy, saying it could make them responsible for his future actions.

“We’re not saving McCarthy because everything McCarthy does after that, we get blamed for and he’s not reliable,” Congressional Progressive Caucus Chairwoman Pramila Jayapal (D., Wash.) said last week. “I don’t trust the guy.”

The vote to remove McCarthy as speaker has been a long time coming. McCarthy had regularly acquiesced to the demands of hard-line conservatives, given the razor-thin House GOP majority and the precariousness of his post. In a concession McCarthy made to dissidents earlier this year, any single lawmaker can trigger a vote on whether to oust the speaker.

Following a series of votes last week aimed at placating the party’s far-right wing, a political reality emerged: McCarthy could never get enough dissidents on board. With the government’s funding set to expire on Sunday at 12:01 a.m., he brought to the floor Saturday a measure keeping the government open through mid-November without conservative demands attached.

“I tried every possible way,” McCarthy told reporters after the vote.

The motion to vacate has come up for a vote only once in the House, more than 100 years ago, and not successfully. In 1910, allies of then-Speaker Joseph Cannon (R., Ill.) brought up the motion in order to vote it down, as a show of strength. In 2015, former Rep. Mark Meadows (R., N.C.) took the initial step of filing a motion to vacate against then-Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) by dropping a resolution in a wooden hopper on the House floor. But Meadows never took the next step to call it up for a vote.

McCarthy’s decisive action on Saturday took the Hill by surprise. Many lawmakers believed McCarthy would be willing to bring up legislation that needed bipartisan support only after a shutdown had begun and the real-world pain, including delayed pay for government workers and military members, had set in. But a series of votes on Thursday and Friday left a swath of House Republicans frustrated with their hard-right colleagues and eager to avoid a shutdown.

Many conservatives have focused on overhauling the process of passing spending bills as their best shot to rein in federal spending. Instead of passing sprawling year-end spending packages, they have pressed McCarthy to bring up the 12 individual spending bills that fund the government.

But even after a week of voting on dozens of amendments and four full-year spending bills -- three of which passed -- the group wasn’t satisfied. On Friday, a group of 21 House Republicans sank a conservative stopgap measure that would have kept the government open for a month at lower spending levels while also tightening border security, saying it fell short.

That left Republicans stuck. At a House GOP meeting Saturday morning, House GOP Whip Tom Emmer (R., Minn.), responsible for counting votes, delivered a clear message. There were six House GOP lawmakers who wouldn’t support a short-term spending bill of any duration. That meant there was no path for a conservative stopgap bill to pass the House and avoid a shutdown.

Instead McCarthy went ahead with a short-term deal with disaster relief attached but no contentious policy provisions. After a frantic couple of hours during which Democrats rushed to analyze the bill’s text, it passed overwhelmingly in a 335-91 vote. The Senate threw in the towel on its own short-term proposal and passed the House bill 88-9.

At 11:15 p.m. on Saturday, less than an hour before the government was set to shut down, the White House released a statement saying that President Biden had signed the measure.

--Siobhan Hughes and Andrew Restuccia contributed to this article.

The Wall Street Journal