Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) recently announced his intention to file a motion to vacate House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) soon.
.@SpeakerMcCarthy is going to get his wish. I’m going to file a motion to vacate against him this week.
If at this time next week Kevin McCarthy is still Speaker of the House, it will be because the Democrats bailed him out. He can be their Speaker, not mine. pic.twitter.com/ITlcwynY39
— Rep. Matt Gaetz (@RepMattGaetz) October 1, 2023
On CNN’s “State of the Union,” anchor Jake Tapper asked Gaetz, “The House gavels back in tomorrow at noon. Are you going to make a motion to vacate?”
“Speaker McCarthy made an agreement with house conservatives in January, and since then he has 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 had set up is the last straw,” Gaetz replied, according to Breitbart News.
“And overnight I learned that Kevin McCarthy had a secret deal with Democrats on Ukraine as he was baiting Republicans to vote for a continuing resolution without Ukraine money, saying that we were going to jam it in the Senate on Ukraine, he turns around and makes a secret deal,” Gaetz added.
“So, a motion to vacate tomorrow?” Tapper asked.
“I do intend to file a motion to vacate the Speaker McCarthy this week,” Gaetz responded. “I think we need to rip off the band-aid. The one thing everybody has in common is no one trusts McCarthy. He lied to Biden, he lied to House conservatives.”
The conservative firebrand has been flirting with the idea of ousting McCarthy from the speakership ever since the speaker relied on support from House Democrats to pass legislation that avoided a government shutdown.
In January 2021, McCarthy’s journey to becoming speaker was postponed 17 times because of conservative holdouts. Notably, Gaetz was one of them. McCarthy was forced to enter negotiations with his fellow House Republicans and, among such negotiations, was the ability for one member to file a motion to vacate the speaker.
Ever since becoming speaker, McCarthy has been forced to act as a true conservative rather than a squish, play-along-to-get-along Republican. Yet, McCarthy has made some deals with Democrats that differ from what he said he would do if elected speaker.
In May 2023, Congress and the White House were unable to reach a plausible deal on the debt ceiling, prompting McCarthy and Biden to enter a slew of negotiations. Among such negotiations was the allowance of $78 billion for the Internal Revenue System (IRS), as the New York Post reported.
In his first speech as speaker, McCarthy said he and his fellow House Republicans would repeal $80 billion in funding for the IRS. Of course, that did not come to pass. At the time, Rep. Dan Bishop (R-NC) said, “So, there will be 85,260 more IRS agents rather than 87,000 to eat you alive. Big win.”
A Rasmussen Reports poll shows that 42% of U.S. voters favor McCarthy, while 41% do not.
