In a historic vote on Tuesday, Kevin McCarthy was ousted as speaker of the US House of Representatives by a small group of radical members of his own party, led by US Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida.
The Republican conference has been plagued with dysfunction for a while. Still, the vote was a stunning display of just how broken and dysfunctional the system has become. Other House speakers have been pushed out, and former Republican speaker John Boehner retired while facing a threat of being ousted. Yet this is the first time a sitting speaker has been removed by a vote.
Gaetz exercised a little-known procedure that had not been used in more than 100 years to push a vote to “vacate” the speaker’s chair. When it was over, eight Republicans and every Democrat had voted to remove McCarthy.
Under procedures established after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks to ensure continuity of government, an acting speaker pro tempore was appointed from a list that McCarthy had previously drawn up.
US Representative Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, a McCarthy ally who spoke fiercely in his defense during Tuesday’s debate, is serving as acting speaker until a new leader is elected. It is unclear when that vote might happen. At a closed door meeting on Tuesday night, McCarthy told fellow Republicans that he would not run for speaker again.
While the vote showed he had the support of the vast majority of the conference, it is difficult to see how he would have mounted a comeback. It took a torturous 15 ballots for him to win the job in January due to the same group of extreme Republicans who voted for his ouster, and the party might be ready to move on.
The previous time there was an attempt to remove a speaker was in 1910, when Republicans tried to oust Joseph Cannon of Illinois. They were unsuccessful, but the intraparty fighting and divisions probably contributed to a Democratic takeover.
For all of the history and importance of Tuesday’s events, it is also true that the speaker fight is in many ways a sideshow, an even more dysfunctional attempt by a handful of Republicans to use a quirk in House rules to defy the overwhelming bulk of their conference who were satisfied with McCarthy’s leadership, or were at least willing to vote to keep him as speaker.
The real story is not about Gaetz and McCarthy. It is about 50 or more radical Republicans — “radical” because they simply do not believe in compromise and do not accept that it is needed to govern, even when their party holds only a slim majority in the House, and must deal with a Democratic majority in the US Senate and a Democrat in the White House.
It is also about the remainder of the House Republicans who have not figured out a way to deal with the radicals within their own party. One of the concessions McCarthy made to these extremists to win the speakership also made it easier for them to call Tuesday’s vote.
Observers have been calling House Republicans dysfunctional since before McCarthy was elected to Congress in 2006. The dysfunction is also getting worse, regardless of how the speaker fight plays out. For example, while only a handful of Republicans joined Gaetz in trying to bring McCarthy down, 21 Republicans refused to vote for his ill-fated measure to keep the government running last week — and 90 of them voted against McCarthy’s last-minute successful attempt to avert a shutdown.
Perhaps symbolic is that while only eight Republicans ultimately voted against McCarthy, 11 voted against an earlier motion to kill Gaetz’s maneuver without a final vote. Normally, one would expect members to stick with their party on procedural votes.
Not these Republicans.
Last week Republicans brought an agriculture spending bill to the House floor, but it failed miserably. Even the spending bills that they have passed are still dead on arrival in the Senate and no House Republicans have a plan to reach a deal because so many of them are suspicious of even the idea of cutting deals.
We do not know who might replace McCarthy. Nor do we know how long this particular fight will last. What we do know is that the larger dysfunction in the House Republican conference will continue.
Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and a former professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
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