This is a first in the history of the American Congress: the Republican leader of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, was ousted from his post on Tuesday, the victim of fratricidal disputes within his party.
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After a tense debate between conservatives in the chamber, 216 elected officials, including eight Republicans, voted to 210 in favor of firing him.
Immediately after this unprecedented result, a smiling Kevin McCarthy was surrounded by members of his party who hugged him and shook his hand.
The vote ushers in a period of intense turmoil in the House of Commons as a replacement needs to be elected, which promises to be very complicated. This came after an elected official from the far right in the US, Matt Gaetz, filed a motion to fire the “Speaker” even though he was a member of his party.
This elected official from Florida particularly criticizes Kevin McCarthy for negotiating a preliminary budget with elected Democrats to finance the federal government, which many conservatives rejected. He also accuses the Republican tenor of having made a “secret agreement” with President Joe Biden about a possible envelope for Ukraine.
However, the right wing of the Republican Party strongly opposes releasing additional funds to Kyiv and believes that these funds should instead be used to combat the migration crisis at the US-Mexico border.
And it doesn’t matter that the overwhelming majority of Kevin McCarthy’s caucus publicly supported it: the Trumpists had a de facto veto in the House of Representatives, since that institution had a very thin Republican majority.
Mr. McCarthy had believed for a time that he was saving his own head, hoping that the political calculations would prevail and that he could force Democratic support, even very fair ones, in exchange for concessions.
- Listen to the interview Richard Latendresse, White House correspondent for TVA Nouvelles on QUB radio:
“It is up to the Republican Party to end the Republican civil war in the House,” Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a letter after a lengthy meeting Tuesday with his caucus.
“There are countless reasons to let Republicans deal with their own problems. Let them wallow in the quagmire of their incompetence and inability to govern,” progressive elected official Pramila Jayapal said adamantly.
In a sign that the disagreements are tearing Republicans apart, conservative elected officials took turns on the chamber to argue for and against Kevin McCarthy.
“We are on the edge of the abyss. We only have a few minutes left to come to our senses and recognize the serious danger,” Republican elected official Tom McClintock said before the vote.
If the impeachment motion passes, “the House of Representatives will be paralyzed,” “Democrats will rejoice at Republican dysfunction, and the people will be rightly outraged,” he said.
His colleague Tom Cole warned of the “chaos” the House and Republicans would be plunged into if Mr McCarthy were impeached.
“The chaos is on President McCarthy,” Matt Gaetz replied. “Chaos is someone you can’t trust.”
These internal conflicts, exposed in broad daylight, prompted a response from former Republican President Donald Trump.
“Why do Republicans spend their time arguing among themselves, why aren’t they fighting the radical left-wing Democrats who are destroying our country?” he wrote on his Truth Social platform.
Such a vote has not taken place in the United States in more than a century, and no speaker has ever been removed from office.
Could Kevin McCarthy, 58, try to return to his job? The hypothesis is not far-fetched because he has the right to run again.
At your own risk: He was already forcibly elected in January due to the very narrow Republican majority.
To reach the top, he had to make huge concessions to some twenty Trumpists, including the possibility that any elected official would have the power to call a vote to remove him.
A promise that haunted him again on Tuesday.