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      Kevin McCarthy ousted as US House speaker by hard-right Republicans

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      After leading a successful effort to avoid a government shutdown over the weekend, Kevin McCarthy has been removed from his role as US House speaker, ousted by hard-right members of his Republican party less than a year after his election.The ouster of McCarthy represents the first time in US history that a speaker of the House has been removed from office, marking an ignominious end to a short and fraught tenure.The vote to oust McCarthy followed a motion to vacate the chair from the Florida Republican congressman Matt Gaetz. After McCarthy’s Republican allies failed to block the motion from moving forward, a final vote was held on Tuesday afternoon. Eight hard-right Republicans joined 208 Democrats in supporting McCarthy’s removal, as 210 Republicans tried and failed to keep the speaker in place. McCarthy needed a simple majority of voting members to keep his gavel but failed to cross that threshold.“The resolution is adopted,” congressman Steve Womack, the Arkansas Republican who presided over the session, announced after the vote. “The office of speaker of the House of the United States House of Representatives is hereby declared vacant.”Following the declaration, congressman Patrick McHenry, a North Carolina Republican, was designated by McCarthy as the acting speaker until a new House leader is elected. Upon taking the gavel, McHenry quickly called for a recess.“In the opinion of the chair, prior to proceeding to the election of a speaker, it will be prudent to first recess for the relative caucus and conferences to meet and discuss the path forward,” McHenry said.McCarthy’s removal capped a tumultuous nine months in the House, defined by clashes between the speaker and the hard-right flank of his conference. Despite his repeated efforts to appease them, his willingness to collaborate with Democrats to prevent economic chaos sealed his fate. With the narrowest of majorities in the House, Republicans now face the unenviable task of electing a leader who can win nearly unanimous support across a deeply divided conference.Gaetz sought McCarthy’s removal after the speaker worked with House Democrats to pass a stopgap spending bill, known as a continuing resolution, to extend government funding through 17 November. Gaetz also accused McCarthy of cutting a “secret side deal” with Joe Biden on providing additional funding to Ukraine, which has become a source of outrage on the right. McCarthy denied the existence of any secret deal.The House and the US Senate passed the stopgap bill with overwhelming bipartisan majorities, averting a shutdown that could have left hundreds of thousands of federal workers without pay for an extended period.Tuesday’s vote was the first to remove a House speaker in more than 100 years and the first successful such vote in American history. Other recent House speakers, including former Republican leader John Boehner, had previously been threatened with a motion to vacate but never had to endure a full effort to remove them.The referendum starkly illustrated McCarthy’s tenuous grasp on the gavel since needing 15 rounds of voting to secure the House speakership in January.McCarthy has never won the support of many Republicans to his right. Additionally, many of his fellow Republicans felt McCarthy did not secure their side sufficient concessions in the deal that averted the shutdown.“The speaker fought through 15 votes in January to become speaker, but was only willing to fight through one failed [continuing resolution] before surrendering to the Democrats on Saturday,” Bob Good, a Republican congressman from Virginia, said in a floor speech on Tuesday. “We need a speaker who will fight for something, anything besides just staying or becoming speaker.”Before McCarthy learned his fate Tuesday, the House Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries, indicated his caucus would not help McCarthy save his job. In the end, every present House Democrat voted in favor of ousting McCarthy.“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 sent Tuesday. “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.”With the speaker removed, all work in the House will grind to a halt until a new leader is elected. More

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      Kevin McCarthy faces House vote on motion to remove him as speaker

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      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

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      Matt Gaetz introduces motion to oust Kevin McCarthy as House speaker

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      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

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      Matt Gaetz accuses Kevin McCarthy of cutting ‘secret side deal’ with Biden

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      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

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      Republicans attacking Bowman but backing Santos should ‘check values’, AOC says

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      Republicans calling for action against the New York Democrat Jamaal Bowman for triggering a fire alarm in a congressional office building as a vote loomed on a deal to avoid a government shutdown should “check their own values”, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said, citing the lack of action against a GOP New Yorker, George Santos, after he was indicted for fraud.“They are protecting someone who has lied to the American people, lied to the United States House of Representatives, lied to congressional investigators,” Ocasio-Cortez, widely known as AOC, told CNN’s State of the Union.“But they’re filing a motion to expel a member who, in a moment of panic, was trying to escape a vestibule? Give me a break.”Santos won his seat last year but saw his resumé taken apart and his background extensively questioned before being indicted on charges of money laundering and fraud. In May, he pled not guilty. Republicans sidestepped an effort to expel him from Congress, saying legal processes should run their course.Like Ocasio-Cortez, Bowman is a prominent New York progressive. In a statement on Saturday, he denied trying to delay the process that stopped a government shutdown.He said: “As I was rushing to make a vote, I came to a door that is usually open for votes but today was not open. I am embarrassed to admit that I activated the fire alarm, mistakenly thinking it would open the door. I regret this and sincerely apologise for any confusion this caused.“I want to be very clear, this was not me, in any way, trying to delay any vote. It was the exact opposite – I was trying to urgently get a vote, which I ultimately did.”Kevin McCarthy, the speaker under pressure from his own party over the deal with Democrats, likened Bowman’s behaviour to that of Donald Trump supporters who broke into the Capitol on 6 January 2021, trying to overturn an election in a riot now linked to nine deaths.Nicole Malliotakis, a New York Republican, said she was drafting a resolution to expel.Authorities were investigating. In Washington, falsely activating a fire alarm is a misdemeanour.Ocasio-Cortez told CNN: “I think there’s something to be said about, the government’s about to shut down, there’s a vote clock that’s going down, the exits that are normally open in that building were suddenly closed … Jamaal Bowman … he’s fully participating in saying there was a misunderstanding.“But what I do think is important to raise is the fact that Republicans like Nicole Malliotakis and others immediately moved to file motions to censure, motions to expel before there has even been conversations … to even see if there was a misunderstanding here.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“… What they did not do was to commit to the same when George Santos was actually found guilty after a thorough investigation of 13 federal charges.”Santos has reportedly negotiated with federal prosecutors, suggesting a plea deal might be on the cards. He has not been found guilty.Ocasio-Cortez continued: “He’s indicted on everything from wire fraud to actual lying to House investigators. And [Republicans] have been buddying up and giggling with him on the House floor.”Bowman, she said, “admits he’s embarrassed … he apologised. And they are protecting someone who has not only committed wire fraud, not only defrauded veterans, not only lied to congressional investigators, but is openly gloating about it.“[It] is absolutely humiliating to the Republican caucus. And I think that they should really check their own values.” More

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      What is ‘motion to vacate’ – the procedure to oust Speaker McCarthy?

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      The Republican US House of Representatives speaker, Kevin McCarthy, faces an attempt by members of his own party to oust him because he passed a stopgap funding measure with Democratic support to avoid a government shutdown. Representative Matt Gaetz, a hardline Republican lawmaker, said he would file what’s called the “motion to vacate”.What is the motion to vacate?The motion to vacate is the House’s procedure to remove its speaker. The chamber’s current rules allow any one member, Democrat or Republican, to introduce the motion. If it is introduced as a “privileged” resolution, the House must consider it at some point, although it could be delayed with procedural votes.If the motion to vacate comes to the House floor for a vote, it would only need a simple majority to pass. Republicans currently control the House with 221 seats to 212 Democrats, meaning if McCarthy wants to keep his speaker’s gavel, he cannot afford to lose more than four votes.How can one member do this?McCarthy endured a brutal 15 rounds of voting in January before being elected as speaker, during which he agreed to multiple concessions increasing the power of Republican hardliners.One was the decision to allow just one member to put forward a motion to vacate, which meant that hardliners could threaten McCarthy’s speakership at any time.This was a change from the rules in place under his Democratic predecessor, Nancy Pelosi, when a majority of one party needed to support a motion to vacate to bring it to the floor.Who is behind the push to oust McCarthy?Republican Representative Gaetz, a firebrand from Florida and perpetual thorn in McCarthy’s side, has repeatedly threatened to file a motion to vacate. The speaker has been unfazed. In a 14 September closed-door meeting of House Republicans, McCarthy dared Gaetz to bring a motion to the floor.Others including Representatives Dan Bishop and Eli Crane have also suggested they would support a motion to vacate.Has the motion to vacate been used before?The motion was first used in 1910, when Republican speaker Joseph Cannon put forward the motion himself to force detractors in his own party to decide whether they supported him or not, according to the House Archives. The motion failed.In 1997 Republican speaker Newt Gingrich was threatened with a motion to vacate. Although he managed to tamp down resistance and avoid an actual resolution being filed, he resigned in 1998 after disappointing results in the midterm elections that year.In 2015 Republican Representative Mark Meadows filed a motion to vacate against Republican speaker John Boehner. It did not come to a vote, but Boehner resigned a few months later, citing the challenges of managing a burgeoning hardline conservative faction of his party. More

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      ‘Let’s have that fight’: McCarthy and Gaetz go to war over shutdown deal

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      Simmering hostility between Republicans over the bipartisan deal that averted a government shutdown descended into open political warfare on Sunday, a rightwing congressman saying he would move to oust Kevin McCarthy and the embattled House speaker insisting he would survive.“We need to rip off the Bandaid. We need to move on with new leadership that can be trustworthy,” the Florida representative Matt Gaetz told CNN’s State of the Union, saying he would file a “motion to vacate” in the next few days.McCarthy, Gaetz said, lied about “a secret deal” struck with Democrats to later pass money for Ukraine that was left out of the compromise agreement, and misled Republicans about working with the opposition at all.The bill keeping the government funded for 47 days passed the House on Saturday night 335-91, 209 Democrats joining 126 Republicans in support. It cleared the Senate 88-9 and was signed by Joe Biden.In remarks at the White House on Sunday, Biden said the measure extending funding until 17 November, and including $16bn in disaster aid, prevented “a needless crisis”.But, Biden said: “The truth is we shouldn’t be here in the first place. It’s time to end governing by crisis and keep your word when you give it in the Congress. I fully expect the speaker to keep his commitment to secure the passage of support needed to help Ukraine as they defend themselves against aggression.”Asked if he expected McCarthy to stand up to extremists, Biden replied: “I hope this experience for the speaker has been one of personal revelation.”McCarthy hit back at Gaetz, branding him a showman “more interested in securing TV interviews” than keeping government functioning.“I’ll survive,” McCarthy told CBS’s Face the Nation. “You know, this is personal with Matt. He wanted to push us into a shutdown, even threatening his own district with all the military people there who would not be paid.“… So be it. Bring it on. Let’s get it over with it, and let’s start governing. If he’s upset because he tried to push us into shutdown and I made sure the government didn’t shut down, then let’s have that fight.”Gaetz said he would no longer hold to an agreement made in January to support McCarthy in exchange for concessions including a hard position on federal funding. That deal included a loosening of rules to allow a single member to file a motion to vacate, the beginning of the process to remove a speaker.“The only way Kevin McCarthy is speaker of the House at the end of this coming week is if Democrats bail him out, and they probably will,” said Gaetz.“I’m done owning Kevin McCarthy. We made a deal in January to allow him to assume the speakership and I’m not owning him any more because he doesn’t tell the truth. And so if Democrats want to own Kevin McCarthy by bailing him out I can’t stop them. But then he’ll be their speaker, not mine.”McCarthy would need 218 votes to keep his job. Some senior Democrats said they would not vote to save him and would back the minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, instead.“Kevin McCarthy is very weak speaker,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York told CNN, saying she would support Gaetz’s motion.McCarthy “has clearly has lost control of his caucus. He has brought the US and millions of Americans to the brink, waiting until the final hour to keep the government open and even then only issuing a 4[7]-day extension. We’re going to be right back in this place in November.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSpeaking to reporters on Saturday, Jeffries said the deal represented a “total surrender by rightwing extremists”.Republicans loyal to McCarthy also attacked Gaetz and the rightwing House Freedom Caucus for their “destructive” pledge to oust the speaker.“What I just heard was a diatribe of delusional thinking,” Mike Lawler of New York told ABC’s This Week. “They are the reason we had to work together with House Democrats. That is not the fault of Kevin McCarthy, that’s the fault of Matt Gaetz. He’s mealy mouthed and, frankly, duplicitous.”Relations between the speaker and Gaetz reached a new low with a testy confrontation in a meeting on Thursday. Gaetz accused McCarthy of orchestrating a social media campaign against him, the speaker saying he did not rate the congressman highly enough to do so.On Sunday, Gaetz insisted “this is about keeping Kevin McCarthy to his word, it’s not about any personal animosity”.Gaetz claimed McCarthy reached a “secret deal”, promising to introduce a standalone bill to continue funding Ukraine’s efforts to repel Russian invaders.A growing number of Republicans object to the US helping pay for the war. Gaetz said: “However you think about [Ukraine funding], it should be subject to open review [and] analysis, and not backroom deals, so I have to file a motion to vacate against speaker McCarthy this week.”On ABC, Gaetz said he did not expect to have enough votes to remove McCarthy immediately, “but I might have them before the 15th ballot”, an allusion to the time it took to elect the speaker in January.“I am relentless, and I will continue to pursue this objective,” Gaetz said. “And if all the American people see is that it is a uni-party that governs them, always the Biden, McCarthy, Jeffries government that makes dispositive decisions on spending, then I am seeding the fields of future primary contests to get better Republicans in Washington.”Shalanda Young, Biden’s budget director, blamed Republicans for bringing the government to the verge of a shutdown, and urged Congress to take a longer-term view.“We need to start today to make sure that we do not have this brinkmanship, last-minute anxiousness of the American people,” she told ABC. “Let’s do our jobs to not have this happen again. Let’s have full-year funding bills at the end of these 47 days.” More

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      Dianne Feinstein obituary

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      The US senator Dianne Feinstein, who has died aged 90, was long cherished by the CIA and others in the defence and intelligence community as someone whose staunch support they could rely on. Until one day they could not: on 11 March 2009 she launched an investigation into the CIA’s torture of detainees post-9/11.That investigation by the Senate intelligence committee, which she chaired, turned into a bitter struggle with the agency and it tried to block it. She did not buckle and finally, in December 2014, she published her report, revealing the scale and brutality of what the CIA had done and its repeated attempts to mislead Congress and the White House. On top of all that, the report found the torture had proved counter-productive in obtaining valuable intelligence.On the day of publication, she told the Senate: “There are those who will seize upon the report and say ‘see what Americans did’, and they will try to use it to justify evil actions or to incite more violence. We cannot prevent that. But history will judge us by our commitment to a just society governed by law and the willingness to face an ugly truth and say ‘never again’.”Her fight was dramatic enough to interest Hollywood, and the film The Report was released in 2019, with Feinstein played by Annette Bening.What made her fight with the CIA so surprising was that it was out of kilter with her career before and after, as a Senate hawk. She voted for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – though she later expressed regret over the former – supported Republicans in defence procurement projects and defended the spy agencies in controversies such as illegal mass surveillance in 2013.Her reputation as a hawk frequently put her at odds with the Democratic left and this disillusionment with her grew rapidly in the latter part of her career.In February this year, facing calls to stand down as her physical and mental health declined, she said she would not seek re-election in 2024.There was much in her life she could look back on with pride: a trailblazer for women in politics; the calm leadership she displayed as mayor in San Francisco after the killings of her predecessor, George Moscone, and of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to an official position in the US; her success, albeit limited, in getting gun control through the US senate in 1994. But it was the torture report she cited as the achievement she was most proud.The first she heard of the torture was in September 2006, when Feinstein and other members of the intelligence committee were privately briefed by the then head of the CIA, Michael Hayden. Although Hayden played down what the CIA euphemistically described as “enhanced interrogation techniques”, Feinstein was troubled by what she heard.When she became chair of the intelligence committee in 2009 – its first female head – she launched the investigation. The final 6,700-page report remains classified, but she got around this by publishing a 500-page executive summary and that was damning enough.Between 2002 and 2008 the CIA had detained 119 men at “black sites” – secret locations around the world – and of these 39 had been subjected to waterboarding, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, stress positions and “rectal rehydration”.In 2015, Feinstein worked with the Republican senator John McCain in steering through the Senate an amendment that reinforced a ban on torture. The McCain-Feinstein amendment was the kind of bipartisan consensus that Feinstein, a centrist, valued. But, as US politics became more polarised, her attempts to work with Republicans increasingly grated with fellow Democrats.When Donald Trump, as president, began to pack the supreme court with rightwingers, Democrats complained that Feinstein, who was the senior Democrat on the judiciary committee, did not put up enough of a fight. After the 2020 confirmation hearings of a Trump appointee, Amy Coney Barrett, Feinstein left Democrats seething when she hugged the chair, Republican Lindsey Graham.Born in San Francisco, Dianne was the daughter of Betty (nee Rosenburg), a model, and Leon Goldman, a surgeon. Her family was affluent but she had a traumatic childhood: her mother was unstable and given to sudden rages due to an undiagnosed brain disorder. According to David Talbot, in his history of San Francisco in the 1960s through to the 80s, Season of the Witch (2012), Betty once chased her daughter with a knife around a dining table.Dianne attended a convent school before going to Stanford University, where she graduated in 1955 with a bachelor’s degree in political science and history. She went on to secure a job on the state parole board. Although politics was overwhelmingly male-dominated, she was elected in 1969 on to the 11-member San Francisco board of supervisors, basically the city and county council. Runs for mayor in 1971 and 1975 proved unsuccessful.In 1976, she was the target of a bomb attack on her home claimed by a California-based leftwing terrorist group, the New World Liberation Front. The bomb was planted in a window flower box but failed to go off. A few months later, another group, the Environmental Life Force, claimed responsibility for shooting out the windows of her holiday home with a BB gun.She began to carry a concealed handgun for protection. In 1978, dispirited by the combination of the mayoral defeats and being targeted, she told a reporter she was on the verge of quitting politics.Only hours after this exchange, the mayor of San Francisco, Moscone, and Milk, a fellow supervisor, were shot dead in City Hall by a former supervisor. Feinstein was the first into Milk’s office. She told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2008: “It was one of the hardest moments, if not the hardest moment, of my life.” Checking Milk for a pulse, one of her fingers slipped into a bullet hole.As president of the board of supervisors at the time, she was well placed to take over as mayor, which she duly did, becoming the first female to occupy the post.She served until 1988. With Aids rampant, she supported many initiatives to help the gay community. She secured federal funding for an overhaul of the cable car network, which proved popular with residents and tourists.Influenced by seeing the damage to Milk’s body, she introduced in 1982 a local ordinance banning most residents from owning handguns. She had her own gun and 14 others that had been handed over in a buy-back scheme melted down and turned into a cross and given to Pope John Paul II on a visit to the Vatican.After an unsuccessful bid to become governor of California in 1990, she was elected as a US senator from California in 1992. She quickly made an impact, guiding through in 1994 the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, outlawing civilian use of certain semi-automatic firearms, though with a proviso that it would expire in 2004 if not renewed, which it was not.She was ranked in 2018 as the second wealthiest senator, with her fortune estimated at about $88m (about £74m).Feinstein married three times: Jack Berman in 1956, with whom she had a daughter, Katherine, divorcing in 1959; Bertram Feinstein in 1962 until his death in 1978; and Richard Blum from 1980 to his death in 2022.She is survived by Katherine, three stepdaughters, and a granddaughter, Eileen. More