Kevin McCarthy Is Chaotically Ousted as Speaker
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has been officially voted out of his speakership, going down in a 216-to-210 vote Tuesday afternoon. He will be replaced temporarily by a speaker pro tempore, North Carolina Republican Patrick McHenry, while the House gets back to voting on a replacement. One possible replacement? Kevin McCarthy.
Regardless of whether he is voted back in, McCarthy’s ouster is historic. He becomes the shortest-serving speaker since 1876, lasting just nine months in the job, and the first speaker ever voted out of the position. The House vote on a replacement will in all likelihood not be quick. Some Republicans may line up behind New York Republican Elise Stefanik; expect to hear a lot of votes for Hakeem Jeffries from Democrats.
The House will likely grind through numerous rounds of votes before this is resolved; it may even make the 15 rounds of voting that led to McCarthy’s initial victory look expedient. This could go any number of ways, as neither party seems to have a majority ruling coalition. Democrats may begin pressing the deposed Californian for major concessions in exchange for bringing him back. —Alexander Sammon
6:18 p.m. ET: As the temporary speaker, North Carolina Rep. Patrick McHenry will lead the House through what are sure to be chaotic days ahead. Primarily, his job will be to oversee a new speaker election, all while under a ticking clock—Congress has only about 40 days to avert another government shutdown.
During the dramatic vote to oust McCarthy, McHenry remained an ally to the former speaker and was tasked with trying to strike a deal with the GOP’s far-right conference to avoid a motion-to-vacate vote. It didn’t work. [Read more.]
4:30 p.m. ET: Kevin McCarthy might not necessarily lose the motion to vacate the chair, i.e., end his speakership; although the vote is not looking good for him, there’s still the possibility that he’s persuaded some Republican members who voted against tabling the motion (i.e., ignoring it) to support him by, well, offering them stuff—more of his famous promises! If he does get the boot, though, what happens next?
The long answer is that the House will have an interim speaker—whoever is first on the list McCarthy prepared in January of members who could serve in his absence. (We don’t know who’s on the list.) That person will have to lead the selection of a new permanent speaker before any other business can proceed.
Who would that new speaker be? Right now the leading candidate would be Kevin McCarthy, since the Republicans who are voting to get rid of him don’t know who else they would support. To quote the New York Times: “ ‘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 Mr. McCarthy out, adding that he did not know who he had in mind for the job instead.”
The short answer, in other words, is “more bickering.” —Ben Mathis-Lilley
4:05 p.m. ET: Embattled House Speaker Kevin McCarthy lost a critical initial vote Tuesday afternoon, as 11 far-right Republicans voted with all but five House Democrats not to table a vote on the speaker’s ouster. The failure of that vote, the last-ditch procedural roadblock McCarthy had, means that a small band of Republican hard-liners and Democrats can push McCarthy from his speakership not even nine months into the current Congress. (The five Democratic absences all seem to be due to medical/personal issues and bereavement, other than Florida Rep. Frederica Wilson, who, according to Politico, is out of town and trying to get back.)
Staring down political mortality, McCarthy may soon start seriously considering an appeal to Democrats to save his skin on the forthcoming motion to vacate. There is plenty of bad blood between him and the Democratic caucus, after the speaker reneged on a handshake deal not to entertain a government shutdown, opened the door for an embarrassingly baseless impeachment hearing against President Joe Biden, and, most recently, blamed all of it on Democrats in a Sunday interview with Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation, an incident that seems to have pushed Democrats over the edge.
For now, the minority caucus has been steadfast and nearly unanimous in its pledge to let him die; a representative statement came from New Jersey Rep. Bill Pascrell, who wrote, “If the Republican conference is a circus, why would I go into the tent and step in elephant dung?” He added, “The speaker cannot count on me to save him from the inmates he empowered in the Republican asylum.”
McCarthy has similarly indicated he would rather die than deal with Dems. But as his demise approaches, it’s possible those postures are more like negotiation tactics.
What would it take, after all of that ill will, for Democrats to bail McCarthy out? It would have to be substantial. One idea being floated by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the Democrats’ largest caucus by membership, is a power-sharing agreement.
The terms of that agreement would need to be hammered out, but in broad strokes, it would borrow from last year’s Senate structure, when there was a 50–50 split in the chamber between Democrats and Republicans. Under that agreement, Democrats were given committee chairmanships but received a pledge from crucial Democratic senators that they, in exchange, would not blow up the filibuster.
The House, with its 435 members, would be slightly more unwieldy than the 100-person upper chamber, but the system could be broadly similar. It’s unlikely that Democrats would get committee chairmanships outright, but it could involve changing the ratio of Democrats to Republicans on committees, evening them out such that Republicans would no longer enjoy across-the-board majorities. It’s possible, too, that the minority party would be granted the ability to put bills on the floor.
The details will be critical to any deal and would need to be negotiated. And this would represent a massive concession from McCarthy, along with a formal recognition of the fact that neither party has a full governing coalition. Democrats have been clear that they would need nothing short of a massive concession to bail out McCarthy, and real power sharing is probably the only thing that comes close.
Rumors are flying of other possible asks: an end to the Biden impeachment hearings, a commitment that the National Republican Campaign Committee won’t spend in certainly vulnerable districts in 2024. Some have suggested policy concessions, like a reinstated child tax credit. And those things might be less realistic even than a power-sharing pact.
All of these possibilities seem somewhat unthinkable, but the other, most likely outcomes are similarly dire. McCarthy could lose the speakership outright, essentially ending his political career. Would voters in his district send him back to Washington after that? Would he even want to return? His ousted predecessors in House Republican leadership did not hang around D.C. long. But it’s also possible his constituents in Bakersfield (a GOP stronghold in California) would punish him for brokering such a deal with Democrats. It’s anyone’s guess where his self-preservation instinct will lead him. Fellow House Republicans have punished him for much less.
Here, at last count, is the math: House Democrats are expected to have 208 votes against McCarthy; he can afford only five Republican defections. He lost 11 Republicans on the motion to table, and six have already said they are going to vote him out. It’s narrow, but unless he persuades six of his party’s defectors to flip, it’s hard to see an escape route without Democrats’ help.
Realistically, even McCarthy sees that the current situation is untenable. The government is on track to shut down in 45 days, and even if that is averted, it will need to be funded again next year.
Democrats have been insistent that they will act as a bloc on this, as they have for nearly the entire time McCarthy has been at the helm. For now, it seems as if he would have to blow them away with an offer to extend his political life. Power sharing might be the only price that gets Democrats to budge and that can actually solve this intractable state of affairs. —Alexander Sammon
2:06 p.m. ET: Democrats are making it pretty clear that they are not interested in helping Kevin McCarthy hold on to his job as House speaker.
“It is now the responsibility of the GOP members to end the House Republican Civil War,” wrote House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in a letter to colleagues. “Given their unwillingness to break from MAGA extremism in an authentic and comprehensive manner, House Democratic leadership will vote yes on the pending Republican Motion to Vacate the Chair.”
Several other Democrats have weighed in to rebuke McCarthy. “Speaker McCarthy has shown he cannot govern,” progressive Rep. Ted. Lieu told CNN. Moderate Rep. Annie Kuster said the speaker “is simply not trustworthy.”
Even Rep. Abigail Spanberger, who represents a vulnerable Democratic district in Virginia, described McCarthy as “a man without principle” and said other vulnerable Democrats won’t support him either.
Over the weekend, McCarthy went on Face the Nation and tried to blame Democrats for stalling the last-minute stopgap government funding bill, which narrowly averted a shutdown. But anchor Margaret Brennan pointed out that Democrats actually voted in larger numbers for the bill than Republicans did—90 Republicans voted against it. That interview did not go over well with Democrats, particularly Rep. Matt Cartwright, who represents a Pennsylvania district Donald Trump won in 2020. “After I saw Kevin McCarthy’s interview with Margaret Brennan, all magnanimity left my body,” he told Punchbowl News. —Shirin Ali
Yes, we’re doing this again! Back in January, it took four days of voting and negotiating for the House Republican caucus to elect California Rep. Kevin McCarthy as speaker. Now there is once again chaos atop Congress’ most colorful chamber.
In a nutshell, here’s what happened. In January, McCarthy made an agreement with hard-line conservatives, some of whose terms have never been made public, to ultimately secure their support as speaker. In May, McCarthy made a (public) agreement with Democrats to set the federal budget at a certain level in order to avert a default on the national debt. In September, though, McCarthy (under pressure from hard-liners) attempted to secure further funding cuts during negotiations over a potential government shutdown—then ultimately conceded to Democrats and helped pass a funding bill that largely did not include any of the cuts that the hard-liners sought (cuts that McCarthy had originally, in May, told Democrats he wouldn’t seek).
In other words, McCarthy left both his party’s furthest-right members and the entire Democratic caucus with the belief that he cannot be trusted, which is why Democrats joined hyper-aggressive Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz and other conservatives in a “motion to vacate the chair” in the House, i.e., end McCarthy’s speakership. (Republicans currently hold 221 House seats to Democrats’ 212.)
It succeeded. And what happens next is a fluid situation—there’s no telling what will happen next. No other Republicans have actually said they want to be speaker, which would put us roughly back where we were in January: with McCarthy holding enough support among Republicans that no one else is a plausible candidate to become speaker, but not enough support to win a majority of the entire House, which is what’s required, and actually assume the position. (And yes, the House needs a speaker.)
But the next step is another round of voting. So—onward! We guess! —Ben Mathis-Lilley
