Gaetz’s Game About the Speakership: Matt Gaetz and the Wrecking-Ball Caucus of the Florida House

Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz has been threatening for weeks to start the procedural motions to try to remove Kevin McCarthy from the speakership.

The sin of working with Democrats has now led the loudest extremist, Matt Gaetz of Florida, to promise a vote this week to remove Mr. McCarthy as speaker. If Mr. McCarthy can survive that vote — and he will probably need the votes of a few Democrats to do so — the wrecking-ball caucus will have to slink into the shadows of defeat. No one would be more pleased with that outcome than the core of House Republicans, who are profoundly weary of being shouted down by the Matt Gaetzes of the world.

Had McCarthy not agreed to changes in House rules to make it easier to remove him from office, he wouldn’t be here. But without that concession McCarthy may not have been able to secure the gavel after 15 rounds of voting at the start of the Congress in January.

The resolution is subject to motions that could ultimately block it from getting a vote. motions to table the resolution would be in proper order. The resolution to vacate the speakership wouldn’t happen if those steps were successful.

After introduction, a lawmaker would have to go to the House floor and request a vote on the resolution, which would be considered privileged and therefore require a vote to occur within two legislative days. It could happen as soon as it’s introduced, because party leadership can determine the timing of the vote.

It will take a simple majority of lawmakers present and voting to succeed if the blocking motions fail. The speakership is up for grabs if it passes.

Democratic leaders have refused to engage in any war gaming about the vote. “We haven’t given any thought to how to handle a hypothetical motion to vacate, because we are entirely focused on making sure that we avoid this extreme MAGA Republican shutdown,” Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., said Thursday.

Informal conversations are happening among Democrats about how to handle the vote, but there is no final consensus, according to two senior Democratic aides who asked for anonymity.

Some McCarthy allies, like Rep. Dusty Johnson, R-S.D., argued a temporary fix to funding the government was needed so House Republicans can continue to push for conservative spending policy without the threat of a shutdown. Leaders stressed that with continued resistance from a group of conservative GOP members, there was no way to move a bill with just Republicans. McCarthy can’t lose more than four votes.

The aide said that saving McCarthy wasn’t likely to happen, because there was so little respect for him among the Democrats and because of his fealty to the far right.

An aide said they had not heard a single Democrat voice any interest in saving Kevin. One aide pointed out that the speaker walked away from the budget deal he had with the president just days after it was signed into law as Democrats don’t trust him to cut deals to win votes.

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Three sources with parliamentary expertise, who all asked to be granted anonymity, said that the next immediate order of business before the House would be the election of a new speaker. The speaker pro tempore cannot serve in the line of succession to the presidency so it would be a matter of national security and constitutional prerogative to have a duly elected speaker.

The same things that happened in January at the start of a new Congress, all lawmakers are sworn in, and the House Rules have been approved, would happen in this scenario. Lawmakers could still hold committee hearings and assist constituents, but the business before the House would be to elect a speaker. The process can take days and rounds of balloting until a lawmaker wins a majority in the full House.

How long that could take, or who could replace McCarthy, is hard to predict. Multiple news outlets reported this week that some Republicans have approached Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., should the effort to oust McCarthy succeed. Emmer in turn pledged his support to McCarthy.

Congress narrowly averted a government shutdown on Saturday as the House, in a stunning turnabout, approved a stopgap plan to keep the federal government open until mid-November. After Senate passage, President Biden signed the bill shortly before midnight.

McCarthy told reporters before the vote that Republicans and Democrats should put their partisan differences aside and focus on the American public.

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It pointed to a fight in the future over funding, coming on the heels of a visit by the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, to Washington last month to speak about continuing U.S. support. Congress has approved over a hundred billion dollars of military, humanitarian and economic help since the invasion of Russia by Vice President Joe Biden.

“This bill is a victory for Putin and Putin sympathizers everywhere,” said Representative Mike Quigley of Illinois, the only Democrat to vote against the bill, who said he did so because it did not include aid to Ukraine. “We now have 45 days to correct this grave mistake.”

Johnson pointed to the 21 far right Republican members who blocked a GOP bill on Friday as the reason why the speaker moved to this new plan. Those members “put us in a position to unfortunately pass something a little less conservative. Now the good news is this is still a pathway to get the kind of conservative wins we need through the appropriations process.”

The House of Representatives has canceled their planned recess and will keep moving spending bills as they did in the past.

Conservatives objected to the stopgap bill. Rep. Bob Good, R-Va., told reporters he would vote no against a continuing resolution. “There’s no such thing as a clean CR.” If one passed he didn’t think the House would continue taking up the spending bills.

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Asked by reporters if he was worried about his job, the speaker said, “you know what, if somebody wants to remove because I want to be the adult in the room, go ahead and try.”

After weeks of ignoring demands from Democrats to work on a solution, Speaker Kevin McCarthy presented a proposal for Republicans in a closed-door meeting that he rushed to get onto the floor under a special procedure that allowed it to pass with substantial Democratic help.

Democrats initially complained about Mr. McCarthy’s plan being sprung on them and he was trying to push through a 71-page measure without proper scrutiny. They didn’t want to be accused of keeping the government open by giving U.S aid to Ukraine ahead of paying military and federal employees.

Do you mean that you would shut the government down if there wasn’t funding for Ukraine? Representative Mike Lawler, Republican of New York, asked Democrats on the House floor.

Ultimately, it was scores of his own Republican colleagues who voted to shut down the government. The measure was approved on a vote of 335 to 91, with 209 Democrats and 126 Republicans voting in favor and 90 Republicans and one Democrat in opposition.

“Instead of siding with his own party today, Kevin McCarthy sided with 209 Democrats to push through a continuing resolution that maintains the Biden-Pelosi-Schumer spending levels and policies,” Representative Andy Biggs, Republican of Arizona, wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. “He allowed the D.C. Uniparty to win again. Should he remain speaker of the House?”

The Senate had to take up the legislation since there was no way for the House to act before Monday, which is when a government shutdown is scheduled to begin.

“The American people can breathe a sigh of relief: there will be no government shutdown,” said Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, after the Senate vote closed about three hours before the deadline. “After trying to take our government hostage, MAGA Republicans won nothing.”

It isn’t a huge amount of credit. He put together the deal he had opposed for weeks, and it lasts for 45 days, meaning that Congress will be unable to perform its most fundamental task of paying for a year of operations. And there is no excuse for the damage this deal could do to Ukraine’s fight against Russian aggression, by leaving out the military aid that the Biden administration was planning to send.

The failure to provide any money in the bill was a reflection of the diminishing Republican support for additional funding for Kyiv, as both parties said they were confident they could win money for Ukraine in the weeks ahead.

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A much larger contingent of Republicans also refused to back the measure, which also left out severe immigration restrictions many of them had demanded.

Before the vote, Mr. McCarthy said he recognized that the legislation might spark a challenge to his job but said he was willing to risk it to push a bill through that would keep the government open.

In the end, Democrats celebrated the outcome. Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader, said as he walked to vote for the bill that extreme Republicans had lost. “The American people have won.”

There were twists and turns on Capitol Hill. Fire alarms sounded in the Cannon House Office Building after House Democrats blocked Mr. McCarthy’s plan to study it on the floor. It was later determined that Representative Jamaal Bowman, Democrat of New York, had triggered the alarm, though he claimed it was inadvertent.

House Republicans are demanding deep spending cuts, a cutoff of aid to Ukraine and immigration restrictions amid a wave of asylum seekers streaming across the southern border as the price of any agreement. Senators of both parties argue that Congress should adhere to higher funding levels established in a deal that President Biden negotiated with Mr. McCarthy earlier this year, and they back continued assistance to Ukraine.

Before the sudden turn of events on Saturday, federal agencies were bracing to close if no stopgap were enacted. The armed forces and other so-called essential workers such as air traffic controllers and airport security workers would have remained on the job but without pay until the standoff was resolved. Food and medical assistance for millions of mothers and children would have been in jeopardy.

The largest obstacle to a solution was the fact that the House, where the Republicans hold a tiny minority, wants to shut down the government because it doesn’t like Washington’s spending habits. A plan that would avert a lapse in federal funds was refused to back by that bloc.