Kevin McCarthy, Speaker of the House of Representatives and Republican majority leader, was ousted on October 1st, 2023 by a coalition of Republicans, led by Representative Matt Gaetz.
The move comes after a bipartisan cooperation between McCarthy and House Democrats in the face of an imminent government shutdown, leading to a split between McCarthy and House Republicans. Back in January, when Republicans took control of the House, McCarthy was struggling to get sufficient support to become Speaker. This is in part due to Matt Gaetz and his allies withholding their support to extract concessions from him, the most prominent being an opposition to runaway government spending.
Typically, executive branch departments are funded through individual appropriation bills. In theory, these bills are approved by Congress and signed by the President by October 10th to prevent government shutdown due to agencies running out of funding. In practice, Congress regularly misses that deadline, and it’s only gotten worse in recent years. To buy time and prevent a shutdown, lawmakers in Washington pass what’s known as a “continuing resolution,” which funds the government at certain intervals using the last fiscal year’s budget. Around the winter holidays Congress finally catches up and passes an “omnibus,” which consolidates all the remaining spending bills into a massively bloated piece of legislation which allows funding until the next October, when the cycle repeats. A downside to omnibus bills is that the text (2,700 pages in 2023) receives little to no public review or attention before they pass.
Gaetz wanted to put an end to this practice and herald a return to “regular order” with the consideration of the individual appropriation bills. This would allow for deeper financial cuts and more careful deliberation of the items than an omnibus bill permits since the contents of the omnibus bill are most often must-pass items. When the House waits this long to pass the must-pass items, they don’t receive the deliberation and attention they deserve, and many smaller bills can be pushed through without any partisan review. In September of this year, McCarthy brought up four individual funding bills, all of which were passed by the House. Despite this, he claimed an omnibus would be needed to prevent a shutdown. Gaetz and a few other Republicans saw this as McCarthy going back on the deal that got him his position. He warned that he would move to have McCarthy removed if the funding extension went through.
On September 12th Gaetz said of the matter: “A vote for a continuing resolution is a vote to continue the Green New Deal, a vote to continue inflationary spending, and the most troubling of fashions, a vote for a continuing resolution is a vote to continue the election interference of Jack Smith. We told you how to use the power of the purse: individual, single-subject spending bills that would allow us to have specific review, programmatic analysis and that would allow us to zero out the salaries of the bureaucrats who have broken bad, targeted President Trump or cut sweetheart deals for Hunter Biden.”
McCarthy ignored the threat and brought up a “clean” continuing resolution, which approved current funding levels and $16 billion in disaster relief funds but made no mention of Ukraine support funding or border security. A clean bill is a bill that compiles extensive amendments to a bill into its own, separate bill(one that is just amendments). In response, Gaetz accused McCarthy of making a “secret deal” with Biden and the House Democrats to fund Ukraine, something that a majority of House Republicans oppose. Gaetz told CNN that McCarthy was “baiting Republicans to vote for a continuing resolution without Ukraine money, saying that we were going to jam the Senate on Ukraine” while simultaneously making a “secret deal”.
“We need to move on with new leadership that can be trustworthy,” he told CNN. “Look, the one thing 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,” he added. “And the reason we were backed up against the shutdown politics is not a bug of the system. It’s a feature.”
“He’s the product of a corrupt system that rewards people who collect large sums of special interest money and then redistribute that money in exchange for political loyalty and political favors,” Gaetz said to reporters Monday night, after filing his motion to vacate. “The reason Kevin McCarthy went down today is because nobody trusts Kevin McCarthy. 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.”
McCarthy denies outright that he made any sort of deal, “secret or not,” with Democrats around Ukraine funding. He also claims that Gaetz’s vendetta against him is personal, stemming from a House Ethics Committee investigation opened in July 2021. Gaetz was investigated for drug use, sexual misconduct, and sexual trafficking, but all charges were dropped after the probe.
McCarthy stated on his ? that he will not run again for Speaker, but that he has not considered resignation from the House.
