Historic Moment as Kevin McCarthy, US House Speaker is Ousted By Vote of 216 against 210
Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) bangs the Speaker's gavel for the first time after being elected the next Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives in a late night 15th round of voting on the fourth day of the 118th Congress at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, U.S., January 7, 2023. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
The United States House of Representatives voted yesterday, to oust Kevin McCarthy of California as speaker – a historic moment that threatens to plunge House Republicans even further into chaos and turmoil.
On the vote, the yeas were 216, while the nays were 210. The resolution was adopted. Without objection, the motion to reconsider was laid on the table. The office of Speaker of the House of the United States House of Representatives was thereafter declared vacant.
The House would now need to elect a new speaker, but there is no clear alternative who would have the support needed to win the gavel, the CNN reported.
In the meantime, Rep. Patrick McHenry of North Carolina is the interim speaker.
No House speaker has ever before been ousted through the passage of a resolution to remove them.
The fight over the speakership marked a major escalation in tensions for a House GOP conference that has been mired in infighting — and it comes just days after McCarthy successfully engineered a last-minute bipartisan effort to avert a government shutdown.
The New York Times noted that the ousted Speaker was unable to manage a bitter power struggle within the Republican Party.
Democrats joined with a small group of hard-liners in McCarthy’s own party to strip the California Republican of the speaker’s gavel. His removal underscored the bitter Republican divisions that have festered all year, and capped an epic power struggle between McCarthy and members of a far-right faction who tried to block his ascent to the speakership in January.
They have tormented him ever since, trying to thwart his efforts to keep the nation from defaulting on its debt and ultimately rebelling over his decision over the weekend to turn to Democrats for help to keep the government open.
A tense scene played out on the floor as lawmakers voted to oust the speaker the same way they vote to elect one: by sitting on the House floor and rising one by one in an alphabetical roll call by conducted by the clerk.
A vacancy in the speaker’s chair essentially paralyses the House until a successor is chosen, according to multiple procedural experts. That promises to incite another potentially messy speaker election at a time when Congress has just over 40 days to avert a government shutdown.
The two parties are holding party meetings to decide what to do next. Both will have to choose nominees for speaker. It is unclear whether McCarthy would try to win back his post. It takes a majority of Republicans in their conference to put forward a nominee, who must then win a majority of the votes in House chamber to take the gavel.
There is no clear replacement for Mr. McCarthy. “I think there’s plenty of people who can step up and do the job,” said Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee, one of the rebels who voted to push McCarthy out, adding that he did not know who he had in mind for the job instead.
Ahead of the vote, a surreal Republican-against-Republican debate unfolded on the House floor. Members of the hard-right clutch of rebels disparaged their own speaker and verbally sparred with Mr. McCarthy’s defenders, who repeatedly accused the hard-liners of sowing disarray to advance their own political interests and hoard attention. Democrats sat and watched silently.
“He put his political neck on the line knowing this day was coming,” said Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma and a McCarthy ally. “Think long and hard before you plunge us into chaos,” Mr. Cole implored the speaker’s detractors, “because that’s where we’re headed if we vacate the speakership.”
McCarthy’s detractors savaged him for what they characterised as a failure to wring steeper spending cuts out of the Biden administration and a lack of leadership. “Chaos is Speaker McCarthy,” Mr. Gaetz declared. “Chaos is somebody who we cannot trust with their word.”
Democrats had wrestled in recent days with whether to help McCarthy survive, or at least to stay out of the effort to oust him. But in a closed-door meeting on Tuesday morning, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the minority leader, instructed fellow Democrats not to do so, citing Republicans’ “unwillingness to break from MAGA extremism.” Democrats did not participate in the floor debate.
McCarthy, an inveterate optimist who prides himself on never giving up, stayed confident until the end about his ability to survive. “If you throw a speaker out that has 99 percent of their conference, that kept government open and paid the troops, I think we’re in a really bad place for how we’re going to run Congress,” he said on Tuesday morning.
The proceedings that played out on Tuesday have taken place only once before in the House of Representatives, in 1910. Back then, progressive Republicans tried to remove then-Speaker Joseph Cannon, a conservative known as “Uncle Joe,” for refusing to bring their priorities to the floor for a vote. He survived that vote, but was weakened as a result. Mr. McCarthy is the first to be removed.
Speaking to his constituents on a telephone town hall meeting, New York Times quoted Representative Ralph Norman, Republican of South Carolina, to have said that his party needed to move quickly to vote find a new speaker.
“Who that speaker is I have no idea,” Norman said, noting a number names have been floated.
He added, “Since we only have a four-seat majority, we’ve got to stick together, and that’s gonna be the dilemma — that we’ll have to come up with somebody that’s a conservative and somebody who will do what they say.”
