McCarthy needed either Gaetz and his allies to back off or for a Democrat to vote against the motion for him to keep the Speakership. NBC News journalist Ali Vitali reported that McCarthys allies were calling moderate Democrats essentially begging for them to step in and save McCarthys speakership. Those pleas were denied. Democrats saw no incentive to save McCarthy.
For months, McCarthy has appeased the worst impulses of House Republicans. He unilaterally opened a baseless impeachment inquiry into President Biden after promising it would need to be authorized by a full House vote. He back-tracked on his spending deal with President Biden and risked a government shutdown.
Just this past weekend, McCarthy tried to blame Democrats for bringing the government to the brink of a shutdown in spite of the fact more Democrats voted for the continuing resolution than Republicans. Saying this about a party that you need to help save you days later wasnt a smart strategy.
Democrats also havent forgiven McCarthy for how he handled January 6, as Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Rep Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) told reporters ahead of the vote. In the immediate aftermath of the January 6 insurrection, McCarthy blamed Trump for the attack. But within weeks, he was back at Mar-a-Lago, cozying up to Donald Trump. This began Trumps rehabilitation after his disgraceful effort to overturn the 2020 election.
Amid this motion to vacate, House Republicans expressed their fury with Matt Gaetz to CNNs Manu Raju. Rep Derrick Van Orden (R-WI) said of Gaetz, "The only word I can describe for that is hes either a fool or a liar. Rep Erin Houchin (R-IN) said, "I think Matt Gaetz is a chaos agent." Their anger should be directed inward because Gaetz is a microcosm of the extremism their party has emboldened.
This challenge to McCarthys speakership is the culmination of the Republican Partys decades of appeasing extremists. Establishment Republicans have long enabled and empowered radicals, from Newt Gingrich to Donald Trump to Matt Gaetz, for political gain, thinking they could control them. Now, theyre the ones being controlled.
The far-right Tea Party movement was emboldened amid Barack Obamas ascension to the presidency. We saw the House Freedom Caucus arise as a result of that movement. In 2015, Mark Meadows, then a Republican representative from North Carolina and member of the House Freedom Caucus, threatened then-Speaker of the House John Boehner with a motion to vacate. Boehner resigned and instead handed the gavel to Paul Ryan.
Over the course of the 2016 election, the Republican Party increasingly embraced Donald Trump once he won the nomination. All that mattered to them was what their base wanted the same base that they helped radicalize over the years. Whats happened since then speaks for itself.
This coalition-building with radicals resulted in an increasingly powerful extremist wing of the Republican Party that has cultivated government dysfunction. This attention-hungry, chaos-seeking faction grew to rule the broader party as a whole.
Ahead of the vote, Hakeem Jeffries briefly spoke to the press, keeping the message about the bigger picture: We encourage our Republican colleagues, who claim to be more traditional, to break from the extremists, end the chaos, end the dysfunction, end the extremism Hes right. But unfortunately, this vote wont do anything to bring an end to GOP extremism.
Article that captures the stupidity of McCarthy and how Republicans got here. I hoped Dems would forge a deal w/ him, but he proved over his tenure to not have a single moderate bone in his body. Maybe someone else in their clown car of a party will reach across the aisle.