WASHINGTON — The House of Representatives on Tuesday took the unprecedented step of ousting a speaker from office, nearly nine months after Kevin McCarthy won the powerful gavel in a dramatic 15-round floor fight.
The vote was 216-210, to topple the California Republican. All 208 Democrats teamed up with just eight GOP rebels to vacate the speaker’s chair — the first time in U.S. history that lawmakers have formally voted to remove a sitting speaker in the middle of a term. An overwhelming number of Republicans, 210, voted to keep McCarthy in power, but it was not enough to stop the effort given the GOP’s razor-thin majority.
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The vote threw the GOP-controlled House into chaos as lawmakers struggled to figure out what to do next. The House is now in recess while members meet; the session was ended by Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., a top McCarthy ally, who slammed the speaker’s gavel down after the vote. McHenry will now serve as a temporary replacement for McCarthy with the title speaker pro tempore.
“I recognize that my friends on the other side have a very complex set of partisan, personal and political calculations to make — and I certainly wouldn’t presume to give them any advice about that,” Rules Chairman Tom Cole, R-Okla., a top McCarthy ally who tried unsuccessfully to block Gaetz’s effort, warned on the floor before the vote. “But I would say, ‘Think long and hard before you plunge us into chaos. Because that’s where we’re headed if we vacate the speakership.’”
Cole received big applause and a standing ovation from almost the entire GOP side of the chamber as he finished speaking. He led a parade of McCarthy allies in speaking in favor of retaining the speaker.
But Gaetz, countered: “Chaos is Speaker McCarthy. Chaos is somebody who we cannot trust with their word. …I don’t think voting against Kevin McCarthy is chaos. I think $33 trillion in debt is chaos. I think that facing a $2.2 trillion annual deficit is chaos.”
A vote on McCarthy’s political future will come after the House debates the motion.
Under House rules, McCarthy had until Wednesday to take up the resolution that Gaetz, a conservative Florida Republican and Donald Trump loyalist, filed Monday night. But McCarthy and his allies moved to rip off the Band-Aid and quickly take on the so-called motion to vacate that has consumed the Capitol.
“I get politics. I understand where people are,” McCarthy told reporters. But he added: “I truly believe the institution of the House, at the end of the day, if you throw a speaker out that has 99% of their conference, that kept government open and paid the troops, I think we’re in a really bad place.”
Given how rarely the speakership has been declared vacant — the last time it happened was in 1910, when Speaker Joseph Cannon declared the chair vacant against himself — it’s unclear how exactly it will play out.
A number of senior Democrats have said they won’t vote to rescue McCarthy from the mutiny. Numerous House Democrats exited their own conference meeting Tuesday mum on how they’d vote on a motion to vacate, although they stressed there would be “unity” within the party on a way forward.
“We are not saving Kevin McCarthy,” said Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., as she left the meeting.
In the Democrats’ meeting, leadership played sound of McCarthy’s Sunday interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation” where he said Democrats wanted to shut down the government in last week’s standoff, Connolly recounted. Many rank-and-file Democrats fumed at his remarks.
Democrats heard a range of views about what to do, but “there wasn’t anybody who came to the defense of Kevin McCarthy,” said Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass.
Neal, like others, said they’d defer to Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y. “I’m going to hear what the leader has to say and coalesce around him,” Neal said.
Still, there are Democrats who say they won’t under any circumstances rescue McCarthy.
“I will vote to remove Kevin McCarthy as speaker. I will not be an enabler,” added Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va. “It is absolutely against Democratic interests and the interests of the country, from my point of view, to allow him to persist in office.”
“He’s a MAGA extremist in his politics and is the antithesis of everything we hold dear,” Connolly continued.
Other Democrats didn’t say how they would vote — only that Democrats need to stick together in the face of the GOP civil war over McCarthy’s future.
“Democrats understand right now that our unity is our power as we watch the other side devolve,” said Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., a Senate candidate. “And I am not here to fix the Republican Party, only they can do that.”