House Speaker Kevin MacCarthy has been ousted from his leadership position in a historic vote on Tuesday after a far-right revolt over his reliance on Democrats to pass funding to avert a government shutdown.
The final vote was 216-210, with eight Republicans joining all the Democrats to vote to remove McCarthy. It’s the first time a House speaker has been removed in a no-confidence vote.
“The office of speaker of the House of the United States House of Representatives is hereby declared vacant,” said Republican Rep. Steve Womack of Arkansas, who was presiding over the chamber.
Rep. Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, a top ally of McCarthy’s and a member of the Financial Services Committee, was then appointed speaker pro tempore. The rules of the 11th Congress state that “in the case of a vacancy in the office of speaker, the next member” named on a list submitted by McCarthy to the clerk of the House in January will become speaker pro tempore until a speaker is elected.
House Republicans met Tuesday night as a conference to discuss their next steps. McCarthy told his colleagues he would not run for speaker again.
“The reason Kevin McCarthy went down today is because nobody trusts Kevin McCarthy,” Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida told reporters after the vote. “Kevin McCarthy has made multiple contradictory promises, and when they all came due, he lost votes of people who maybe don’t even ideologically agree with me on everything.”
“This represents the ripping off of the Band-Aid and that’s what we need to do to get back on track,” the Florida Republican added.
Along with Gaetz, seven Republican members voted to oust McCarthy: Reps. Andy Biggs of Arizona, Ken Buck of Colorado, Tim Burchett of Tennessee, Eli Crane of Arizona, Bob Good of Virginia, Nancy Mace of South Carolina and Matt Rosendale of Montana.
A day earlier, Gaetz accused McCarthy of making a “secret side deal” with President Biden on Ukraine aid to get a short-term funding bill passed hours before the government was set to shutdown. The California Republican denied having made any deal in exchange for Democratic votes.
Eleven Republicans voted against the earlier motion to table Gaetz’s resolution, an ominous sign of what was to come for McCarthy.
The speaker of the House is not only the leader of the chamber but also second in line for the presidency. Ousting a sitting speaker by vote in the middle of a congressional term is unprecedented in American history, and McCarthy’s allies warned that doing so would set a precedent that would hang over every speaker moving forward. That argument did not persuade Democrats to come to McCarthy’s rescue.
“We’re in uncharted territory. We’ve never had this situation before,” Matthew Green, a politics professor at Catholic University, told CBS News.
Green said the vote shows the Republican Party has “too many members who don’t like McCarthy personally or otherwise are disdainful of party norms.”
“There was a norm that you don’t do this. This rule has been on the books more or less continuously since 1910,” Green said. “You’ve got a party that’s very small and you’ve got a faction of members who are disdainful of these norms, and that makes it extremely difficult to govern.”
Democratic leadership members had urged their caucus to vote “yes” on the motion to vacate.
“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,” Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York wrote to his caucus.
Up until the vote, McCarthy had expressed confidence to reporters that he would prevail.
“I’m an optimist because I think there’s no point in being anything else,” McCarthy said.
