The shutdown standoff lined up Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz (R) to prove whether or not he was “all talk” as he responded to questions about his seriousness to vacate the speaker.
“I think we need to rip off the Band-Aid.”
(Video: CNN)
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) victory lap on passage of a clean continuing resolution may just be the precursor to a wholly different fight on Capitol Hill Monday. With more than 40 percent of the House Republican Conference on the record in opposition to a 45-day stopgap, the Florida legislator assured CNN anchor Jake Tapper, a motion would be filed to oust McCarthy.
“I do intend to file a motion to vacate against Speaker McCarthy this week,” he said Sunday on “State of the Union.” “I think we need to rip off the Band-Aid. I think we need to move on with new leadership that can be trustworthy.”
As Gaetz saw it, McCarthy’s goal had been to “delay everything” such that Republicans were backed into a corner with Saturday’s funding deadline such that passage would have to happen, a move the lawmaker suggested cemented a unified distrust of the speaker.
“Look, the one thing that everybody has in common is that nobody trusts Kevin McCarthy. He lied to Biden. He lied to House conservatives. He had appropriators marking to a different number altogether. And the reason we were backed up against the shutdown politics is not a bug of the system. It’s a feature,” contended the Florida congressman who also griped about the speaker cutting a deal with Democrats on continued funding of Ukraine.
Ahead of his appearance on CNN, California Democrats were among those ripping the GOP firebrand as “all talk” as they challenged the notion that he would move forward with the motion to vacate after previous threats.
Reps. Jimmy Gomez and Eric Swalwell both captioned a post from Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs (R) slamming conservative holdouts who’d left the Democrats nearly in unanimous agreement with McCarthy and a meager majority of Republicans on passage of the CR.
“Like I said, ‘McCarthy and the Republicans failed to cut aid for working families because @HouseDemocrats held the line and put people above politics.’ Matt Gaetz, Biggs and the rest of them are all talk,” wrote Gomez on X. “They’ll never make a motion to remove McCarthy as Speaker.”
Likewise, Swalwell posted, “I really admire @SpeakerMcCarthy for putting clowns like Biggs and Gaetz in an absolute box. They’ll never have the courage to try and remove him. McCarthy has really played them.”
Like I said, “McCarthy and the Republicans failed to cut aid for working families because @HouseDemocrats held the line and put people above politics.”
Matt Gaetz, Biggs and the rest of them are all talk. They’ll never make a motion to remove McCarthy as Speaker. https://t.co/A9WQxjYxEh
— Rep. Jimmy Gomez (@RepJimmyGomez) September 30, 2023
I really admire @SpeakerMcCarthy for putting clowns like Biggs and Gaetz in an absolute box. They’ll never have the courage to try and remove him. McCarthy has really played them. https://t.co/dW00XmEmmw
— Rep. Eric Swalwell (@RepSwalwell) September 30, 2023
Similarly, Tapper tried to challenge Gaetz for being motivated by “clicks” and “likes” and “Fox hits” instead of following congressional procedure, the lawmaker made his case that McCarthy had violated an agreement from the start of the 118th Congress.
“Speaker McCarthy made an agreement with House conservatives in January and since then he’s been in brazen, repeated material breach of that agreement. This agreement that he made with Democrats to really blow past a lot of the spending guardrails we set up is a last straw.”
Gaetz further suggested that there was strong Republican support to oust McCarthy and that it would take Democrats for him to maintain control of the gavel. When asked how many members of the conference were backing the motion to vacate, he explained, “Enough so that when you host this show next week, if Kevin McCarthy is still speaker of the House he will be serving at the pleasure of the Democrats.”
“He will be working for the Democrats. The only way that McCarthy will be speaker of the House is if Democrats bail him out,” vowed Gaetz who himself promised not to make a deal with the left on this issue. “Now they probably will. I actually think that when you believe in nothing as Kevin McCarthy does, everything’s negotiable and I think he’ll cut a deal with the Democrats.”
“I’m done owning Kevin McCarthy. We made a deal at the end of January to allow him to assume the speakership, and I’m not owning him anymore because he doesn’t tell the truth. If Democrats want to own Kevin McCarthy by bailing him out, I can’t stop them, but then he’ll be their speaker, not mine,” he added.
On that note, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) suggested her party may be up for a deal to save McCarthy — for a price.
“I believe that it’s up to the Republican conference to determine their own leadership and deal with their own problems. But it’s not up to Democrats to save Republicans, from themselves especially,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a separate interview on “State of the Union.”
“I certainly don’t think that we would expect to see that unless there’s a real conversation between the Republican and Democratic caucuses and Republican-Democratic leadership about what that would mean, but I don’t think we give up votes for free,” she added, commenting on the possibility of negotiating with McCarthy.
For his part, McCarthy had chided members of the GOP who hadn’t fallen in line as he attempted to fashion himself a conservative for temporarily holding spending to fiscal year 2023’s bloated levels. “If you have members in your conference that won’t let you vote for appropriations bills, who don’t want an omnibus and won’t vote for a stopgap measure, so the only answer is to shut down and not pay our troops — I don’t want to be a part of that team. I want to be a part of the conservative group that wants to get things done.”
Native of Brooklyn, NY, Kevin Haggerty is a graduate of Hunter College where he studied Cultural Anthropology and Geography. An avid reader and truth seeker, he currently resides in Texas with his wife and their dog and, when he isn't researching current events and their impacts, you'll find him spending time with friends and family or working on his next novel.
Comment
We have no tolerance for comments containing violence, racism, profanity, vulgarity, doxing, or discourteous behavior. If a comment is spam, instead of replying to it please click the ∨ icon below and to the right of that comment. Thank you for partnering with us to maintain fruitful conversation.