US Congress

Stunning. Unprecedented. Uncharted territory. A first in American history. Kevin McCarthy’s removal as speaker of the House of Representatives on Tuesday was a startling moment. But it only confirmed that the predictable thing about American politics is now its unpredictability. Chaos and dysfunction increasingly look not anomalous but characteristic. The Biden administration’s aura of calm stewardship can only go so far, because the saboteurs hold significant chunks of government machinery. The bitter divisions within the Republican party keep the rest of the country captive.A party once known for its ruthless discipline is obviously unmanageable; Donald Trump piously bemoaned the infighting of a party he has done more than anyone to break. Mr McCarthy’s removal by a handful of his own party’s lawmakers came on the same day that the former president, and likely Republican presidential nominee, was in court on fraud charges – only one of the multitude of civil and criminal cases bearing down on him, none of which have dented his popularity. Stories that would once have dominated the news for a week or more now jostle for coverage. In another courtroom, Hunter Biden became the first child of an incumbent president to be criminally prosecuted, pleading not guilty to federal gun charges.It is less than three years since an armed mob stormed the Capitol. Six in 10 Republicans still don’t believe that Joe Biden won legitimately in 2020. Last week, House Republicans launched a confected impeachment inquiry – equal parts fishing expedition and misinformation exercise. Threatening to shut down the government and leading the country to the brink of default on its debt has become almost routine for them.It took Mr McCarthy 15 roll-call votes to become speaker in the first place, and he only succeeded after agreeing to make it easier to remove him. He held the post for less than a year before far-right Republicans moved against him, apparently motivated largely by ego, spite and anger that he had worked with Democrats to pass a short-term funding bill to avert shutdown. (It is, perhaps, another sign of the times that the ringleader, Matt Gaetz, is under investigation by the House ethics committee over allegations of sexual misconduct and misuse of funds.) Mr McCarthy gave Democrats little reason to back him on Tuesday. Quite apart from a shameful record which includes voting to overturn the 2020 election results, he attacked Democrats for “trying to shut down the government” after relying on their votes for the funding bill, and offered them nothing.It is entirely possible that his successor may be worse. The frontrunners are Jim Jordan and Steve Scalise, who reportedly once called himself “David Duke [the former Ku Klux Klan leader] without the baggage”. Whoever wins will have to contend with the same ultraconservatives. Partial government shutdown looms again, with a 17 November deadline to provide more money. And Mr McCarthy’s departure is felt far from Washington: Democrats backed the spending bill shorn of funding for Ukraine, believing he would help to see it through separately. Beyond Kyiv’s immediate need lies the necessity of firming up longer-term support in the west.Democrats may benefit from the infighting of the Republicans, who look increasingly self-obsessed and extreme. But voters could also conclude that the political class as a whole is failing – and perhaps, as Mr Trump must hope, that it will take a disruptive strongman to get things done. It’s their party, but the rest of the world has to live with it.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

The House will hold a vote on Tuesday afternoon on removing Kevin McCarthy from the speaker’s chair, with hard-right members prepared to oust the Republican leader just nine months after he was elected.Congressman Matt Gaetz introduced a motion to vacate on Monday night, as the hard-right lawmaker from Florida continued to rail against McCarthy for collaborating with Democrats to avoid a government shutdown over the weekend.McCarthy and his allies had tried to quash Gaetz’s rebellion by introducing a procedural motion to table, or kill, the proposal earlier on Tuesday. That motion failed in a vote of 208 to 218, teeing up the final vote on removing McCarthy. Eleven House Republicans voted against the motion to table.The House math is difficult for McCarthy. With such a narrow majority, McCarthy can only afford to lose four Republican votes and keep his gavel, assuming every House Democrat votes against the speaker. When the House held the vote on the motion to table on Tuesday, five Democrats and two Republicans were recorded as absent. But with 207 Democrats voting in unison against the motion to table, Gaetz had more than enough votes to advance his motion to vacate.House Democratic leaders revealed shortly before the procedural vote on Tuesday that they were urging caucus members to vote “yes” on the motion to vacate the chair. After meeting with members on Tuesday morning, the House Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries, said his caucus was “unified in our commitment to put people over politics”.“House Democrats remain willing to find common ground on an enlightened path forward. Unfortunately, our extreme Republican colleagues have shown no willingness to do the same,” Jeffries said in a “Dear Colleague” letter. “Given their unwillingness to break from [Make America Great Again] extremism in an authentic and comprehensive manner, House Democratic leadership will vote yes on the pending Republican Motion to Vacate the Chair.”Speaking to reporters after a meeting with his conference on Tuesday morning, McCarthy appeared somewhat resigned to his fate, even as he said he was “confident” he could hang on.“If five Republicans go with Democrats, then I’m out,” McCarthy acknowledged.A reporter said: “That looks likely.”McCarthy replied: “Probably so.”If the motion to vacate is successful, McCarthy will have an opportunity to choose a temporary speaker until an election is held. In January, the House required 15 rounds of voting to elect McCarthy as speaker, and a second election could prove even more prolonged and contentious.Even as he stared down the potential end of his speakership, McCarthy expressed no regret about working with Democrats to keep the government open. The stopgap bill passed by the House on Saturday will keep the government funded through 17 November, averting a shutdown that could have forced hundreds of thousands of federal employees to go without pay.“At the end of the day, keeping the government open and paying our troops was the right decision. I stand by that decision,” McCarthy said. “If I have to lose my job over it, so be it, but I’m going to fight for the American public, and I’ll continue to fight.”Although it appears Gaetz has the votes to remove McCarthy, some other hard-right Republicans who opposed McCarthy when he ran for the speakership in January were more cautious about ousting him.Congressman Ralph Norman, a hard-right Republican of South Carolina who initially opposed McCarthy’s speakership bid, urged his colleagues to focus their attention on passing full-year funding bills.“I have been profoundly disappointed in several elements of Speaker McCarthy’s leadership, but now is not the time to pursue a Motion to Vacate,” Norman said on X. “Instead, Congress desperately needs to devote its full attention to passing these appropriations bills within the next 43 days.”But another 10 or so hard-right lawmakers lined up in support of the motion to vacate, likely sealing McCarthy’s fate. Despite the grim state of affairs, McCarthy’s allies took to the House floor to defend his reputation.“The overwhelming majority of my party supports the speaker that we elected. We’re proud of the leadership he’s shown,” said congressman Tom Cole, a Republican of Oklahoma. “There’s a second group – a small group. Honestly, they’re willing to plunge this body into chaos and this country into uncertainty for reasons that only they really understand. I certainly don’t.”Stepping up to the mic, Gaetz rejected Cole’s argument, instead insisting that the current state of the House represented an unacceptable status quo.“My friend from Oklahoma says that my colleagues and I who don’t support Kevin McCarthy would plunge the House and the country into chaos,” Gaetz said. “Chaos is speaker McCarthy. Chaos is somebody who we cannot trust with their word.” More

Congressman Matt Gaetz, a hard-right Republican of Florida, introduced a motion to remove Kevin McCarthy as House speaker on Monday, expressing outrage over the Republican leader’s successful efforts to avoid a government shutdown this weekend.“I have enough Republicans where at this point next week, one of two things will happen: Kevin McCarthy won’t be the speaker of the House, or he’ll be the speaker of the House working at the pleasure of the Democrats,” Gaetz told reporters after he filed the motion. “I’m at peace with either result because the American people deserve to know who governs them.”McCarthy responded minutes later on social media: “Bring it on.”The announcement comes two days after the House passed a stopgap spending bill to extend government funding through 17 November, averting a shutdown that could have forced hundreds of thousands of federal workers to go without pay. Both the House and the Senate passed the bill, known as a continuing resolution, with overwhelming bipartisan majorities before Joe Biden signed the bill late on Saturday evening.But Gaetz had warned that he would move to oust McCarthy if the speaker collaborated with Democrats to keep the government open and he followed through with that threat on Monday evening. Now that Gaetz has introduced a motion to vacate the chair, House leadership will have to schedule a vote on the matter within two legislative days.Moments after his much-anticipated move on the House floor, Gaetz held an impromptu press conference in which he acknowledged that his effort might fail – at least on the first try.“I think that’s the likely outcome,” Gaetz said. But in leaving open the prospect of repeated moves to get McCarthy fired, Gaetz predicted that support could grow and the initial vote on evicting McCarthy would be “the floor and not the ceiling”.McCarthy’s allies are expected to deploy some procedural tactics to derail Gaetz’s motion, but if those efforts fail, it will take only a simple majority of voting members present to remove the speaker.Because of House Republicans’ narrow majority, McCarthy can only afford to lose five votes within his conference and still hold the speakership, assuming every House member participates in the vote. Despite that tricky math, McCarthy has struck a defiant tone in recent days, insisting he has the votes to keep his gavel.“I’ll survive,” McCarthy told CBS News on Sunday. “So be it. Bring it on. Let’s get over with it and let’s start governing.”Previewing his motion in a House floor speech on Monday afternoon, Gaetz accused McCarthy of cutting “a secret side deal” with Biden to provide additional funding to Ukraine, which has become a source of outrage among hard-right lawmakers. The stopgap spending measure passed by Congress did not include additional money for Ukraine, but Biden said on Saturday that he did “fully expect the speaker will keep his commitment to the people of Ukraine” and soon pass a supplemental funding bill to address that omission.“It is going to be difficult for my Republican friends to keep calling President Biden ‘feeble’ while he continues to take Speaker McCarthy’s lunch money in every negotiation,” Gaetz said in his floor speech. “Members of the Republican party might vote differently on a motion to vacate if they heard what the speaker had to share with us about his secret side deal with Joe Biden on Ukraine.”Speaking to reporters after the floor speech, Gaetz indicated he would keep pushing motions to vacate until McCarthy is removed.“It took Speaker McCarthy 15 votes to become the speaker, so until I get to 14 or 15, I don’t think I’m being any more dilatory than he was,” Gaetz said.It remains unclear how many Republicans will join Gaetz in pushing for McCarthy’s ouster, but at least one other hard-right lawmaker, Eli Crane of Arizona, has indicated he will support the motion.In the hours leading up to Gaetz’s announcement, however, House Republican leaders lined up in support of McCarthy.“We have a lot of work to do. Now is not the time for distractions,” Steve Scalise, the House majority leader, said on Monday. “I’m committed to continuing to work with [McCarthy] and our entire leadership team on reducing spending, securing our border, and fighting for hardworking Americans.”Asked who he would support as a replacement for McCarthy, Gaetz said: “I think very highly of Steve Scalise. I would vote for Steve Scalise” as well as many other Republicans.Scalise currently serves as House majority leader, the No 2 job in the chamber.McCarthy’s fate may come down to attendance numbers and House Democrats’ strategy. Absences could potentially lower the threshold of a simple majority needed for McCarthy to keep his gavel, as some House members will be looking to travel to California in the coming days for Senator Dianne Feinstein’s funeral. Feinstein will lie in state at San Francisco city hall on Wednesday before funeral services will be held on Thursday.Several House Democrats late on Monday said they would await direction from party leader Hakeem Jeffries.Jeffries has not said so far if his caucus would join rightwing Republicans to help topple McCarthy or if Democrats might support him in exchange for political or legislative favors.Some centrist Democrats have also indicated they would vote “present” on a motion to vacate, which would similarly lower the threshold of a simple majority. Asked on Monday whether he would strike a deal with Democrats to save his speakership, McCarthy offered a vague response about protecting the integrity of the House.“I think this is about the institution,” McCarthy said. “I think it’s too important.” More

Congressman Matt Gaetz continued to attack Kevin McCarthy on Monday over the House Republican speaker’s successful efforts to avoid a government shutdown, even as other hard-right lawmakers came to McCarthy’s defense.Speaking on the House floor on Monday, Gaetz railed against McCarthy, accusing the speaker of cutting “a secret side deal” with Joe Biden to provide additional funding to Ukraine. The stopgap spending measure passed by Congress on Saturday, which extended government funding through November 17, did not include additional money for Ukraine, but members of both parties have called for a supplemental bill to address that omission. Biden said on Saturday that he did “fully expect the speaker will keep his commitment to the people of Ukraine” and soon pass a supplemental funding bill.“It is going to be difficult for my Republican friends to keep calling President Biden ‘feeble’ while he continues to take Speaker McCarthy’s lunch money in every negotiation,” Gaetz said in his floor speech. “It is becoming increasingly clear who the speaker of the House already works for, and it’s not the Republican conference.”Gaetz had vowed on Sunday that he would soon introduce a motion to remove McCarthy as speaker, but he declined to outline a specific timeline for that effort in his floor speech. Calling on McCarthy to reveal the details of his alleged “secret deal” with Biden, Gaetz suggested the motion could be introduced as early as Monday.“There may be other votes coming today or later this week that could be implicated by the answers to these questions,” Gaetz said. “Members of the Republican party might vote differently on a motion to vacate if they heard what the speaker had to share with us about his secret side deal with Joe Biden on Ukraine. I’ll be listening. Stay tuned.”Speaking to reporters after the floor speech, Gaetz reiterated his plans to introduce a motion to vacate the chair at some point this week, and he indicated he would keep pushing the issue until McCarthy is removed.“It took Speaker McCarthy 15 votes to become the speaker, so until I get to 14 or 15, I don’t think I’m being any more dilatory than he was,” Gaetz said.Gaetz’s threats come after McCarthy was forced to rely on Democratic votes to advance the stopgap funding bill, known as a continuing resolution. Gaetz had threatened that he would move to oust McCarthy if he collaborated with Democrats to keep the government open, and he now appears ready to make good on that threat.Any single House member can force a vote on vacating the chair, and the motion requires only a simple majority for approval. Because of House Republicans’ narrow majority, McCarthy can only afford to lose five votes within his conference and still hold the speakership, assuming every House member participates in the vote.Despite that tricky math, McCarthy has responded to Gaetz’s threats with defiance, insisting he has the votes to keep his gavel.“I’ll survive,” McCarthy told CBS News on Sunday. “So be it. Bring it on. Let’s get over with it and let’s start governing.”Some of McCarthy’s allies have rallied to his defense, accusing Gaetz of jeopardizing House Republicans’ majority and empowering the Democratic minority. In a floor speech delivered just before Gaetz stepped up to the podium, Congressman Tom McClintock, a Republican of California, noted that the removal of the speaker would grind the House to a halt.“The immediate effect will be to paralyze the House indefinitely because no other business can be taken up until a replacement is elected … I cannot conceive of a more counterproductive and self-destructive course than that,” McClintock said. “I implore my Republican colleagues to look past their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests and their selfish views and to make a wise decision when it’s needed most at this critical moment in the life of our country.”McCarthy has also received some support from Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, the hard-right Republican of Georgia who has become one of the speaker’s most surprising allies since his election in January.In a 20-post thread shared on X, formerly known as Twitter, Greene argued that Gaetz’s proposed motion to remove McCarthy as speaker “gives the upper hand to the Democrats”.“I agree with Matt Gaetz that things must change,” Greene said, “but I don’t agree that a motion to vacate will effectively create the changes needed to solve the intentional systemic failure that create the annual never ending [continuing resolutions] and Christmas omnibus mega spending packages.”Even as she rallied around McCarthy, Greene simultaneously admonished her Republicans colleagues who have reportedly discussed expelling Gaetz, who is at the center of an ongoing ethics committee investigation involving allegations of sexual misconduct and campaign finance violations.“A Republican-led effort to expel Matt Gaetz absolutely will not be tolerated by Republicans across the country,” Greene said. “I can guarantee you that.” More