The United States prevented a partial government shutdown on Saturday with a last-minute law passed by Congress. The solution is not just a temporary solution, a budget extension until November 17th, but it has left open wounds, particularly among Republicans. The continuity of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is uncertain. Some of the twenty members of the hard wing of his party do not forgive him for relying on the Democrats to prevent the government from being shut down. One of the leaders, Congressman Matt Gaetz, filed a motion of censure or impeachment against his own House leader this Monday. The confrontation between the two has taken on personal overtones, but the political derivatives are unpredictable and threaten to plunge the House of Representatives into chaos.
Gaetz is not a popular character in his group. “He’s a charlatan,” Mike Lawler, one of his teammates, said a few days ago. One of the concessions McCarthy made to get elected in January was to allow a single congressman to file articles of impeachment. It remains to be seen how many of his fellow radicals support Gaetz. In a House of Representatives where the Republicans have 221 seats and the Democrats 212, it is enough for there to be half a dozen Republican rebels for McCarthy’s continuity to remain in the hands of the Democrats.
Some Democratic congressmen like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have said it is not their job to bail out Republicans. McCarthy has just ordered the opening of a formal investigation into Joe Biden as a precursor to possible impeachment, so saving his head is no easy task for her. At the same time, the President of the House of Representatives is the one who agreed with Biden on suspending the debt ceiling and the one who has now proposed a temporary measure that has prevented the government shutdown. In addition, almost the only hope is that an agreement on the adoption of the budget laws can be reached in the month and a half gained by the extension.
Democratic House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries has not yet given any indication of what he would do if McCarthy’s continuity were in his hands. “We did not discuss a hypothetical impeachment motion. We will cross that bridge when we get there,” he said Saturday.
One scenario being considered is that a significant group of Democrats abstain or, in other words, simply say “present” at the time of the impeachment vote. There is also the possibility that they vote against the motion submitted to the plenary for consideration, thus rejecting the dismissal through a procedural step. Something like that is more acceptable to them than a vote for McCarthy, but it is still likely that they will want to force some concessions from McCarthy in return. The problem is that for the speaker, once again agreeing with the Democrats means further weakening the position of his people.
The Republican group leader was aware that he was risking his position with his last-minute proposal. He had previously tried to satisfy the radicals in his party with a law that would provide for severe cuts, but this too was rejected by them. In the end, he proposed a provision that excludes new aid to Ukraine, but the vast majority of the items are temporary extensions of spending without cuts. “If I have to risk losing my job to stand up for the American people, I will,” he admitted Saturday as he unveiled his proposal. “If someone wants to remove me because I’m the adult in the room, let them try,” McCarthy said, he later insisted.
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Rescue package for the Democrats
That someone is Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz. “I think we need to move forward with new leadership that can be trusted,” he said Sunday in the CNN interview in which he announced his willingness to file articles of impeachment this week. “The only way for Kevin McCarthy to be speaker of the House of Representatives at the end of next week is for Democrats to save him,” Gaetz said, relying on the support of his people. McCarthy defiantly replied: “So be it. Forward. “Let’s end this and start governing,” he said, ensuring that what exists between him and Gaetz is now “personal.”
This Monday, Gaetz intervened in the plenary session and accused McCarthy of making a secret pact with Biden to authorize additional aid to Ukraine outside the agreement in order to avoid the government shutdown, and again threatened that he would will present a motion of censure, but without doing so until the afternoon. “It is becoming increasingly clear who the speaker of the House of Representatives is already working for and not the Republican caucus,” he said. Then, on the steps of the Capitol, with the joy of the many cameras and microphones, he assured that he would present the proposal as many times as necessary, just as McCarthy needed 15 votes before he was elected.
If McCarthy is removed, it will not be easy to find a replacement who will unite the voices of the party’s moderates and radicals. The lack of leadership would create a deadlock that would not help Democrats, who still need to approve final budget legislation for the new fiscal year that began Oct. 1. The most extreme Republicans – those who “just want to burn everything down,” McCarthy himself said – are not uncomfortable with this power vacuum situation, just as they didn’t care about the government shutdown or the debt ceiling.
The motion is literally to vacate the position of Speaker of the House of Representatives. The first time it was used was in 1910, when then-Republican Speaker Joseph Cannon used it against himself. In this case, silencing his colleagues’ criticism acted as a vote of confidence. Now that a critic brings it forward, it’s like a motion of censure or impeachment. No such motion has yet been filed, but one filed against John Boehner in 2015 ultimately led to his resignation.
If passed, the position would be temporarily filled by the first person on a list that McCarthy himself submitted to the Secretary of the House of Representatives and made public at that time. The provisional president’s first task would be to appoint a new speaker. There is no Republican candidate with as much support as McCarthy, who needed 15 ballots to be elected in January. The risk of a blockage would therefore be very high.
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