McCarthy out – and his RINO cohorts cry

Yesterday, six patriotic Republicans – with two “me, too” players along for the ride – made history. One of them filed a motion to vacate the chair, to remove Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), Speaker of the House. Five more patriots, the two “me, too” players – and 208 Democrats – voted a day later to carry that motion. As a result, Speaker McCarthy is now merely Representative McCarthy, not even in House leadership. Already the chorus of outrage, already building, has escalated to howls. But the ones doing the howling, have none to blame but themselves.

McCarthy shouldn’t have been Speaker

As CNAV said last year, the 2022 Midterms were a disaster. The vaunted Red Wave broke on three Blue Seawalls. CNAV listed them then as complacency, incompetency/fraud, and the souls of half the country being in a dark place. That could easily apply, not only to the entire country, but to the Republican Party alone. RINOs – Republicans In Name Only – are guilty of all three of these counts:

• Complacency – Republican voters didn’t turn out because Donald J. Trump wasn’t on the ballot.
• Incompetency and fraud – for example, Laura Loomer losing her primary to a worse vegetable than Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman. The Republican leadership supported the vegetable, and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) cooperated with them. Worse yet, RINOs in charge of elections in Maricopa County, Arizona gave the general election away to Katie Hobbs and her team – read, “gang.”
• Dark souls – that directly applies to the current Republican leadership. For decades they noisily promised an end to Democratic abuses – then ended up facilitating them. They also promoted a vision of a Representative’s job as simple: track down Grandma’s Social Security check, write Junior’s letter of recommendation to get him into West Point (or The Academy, also known as The Yard, or else Colorado Springs) – and sit down, shut up, and take home the occasional pork chop.

That’s the kind of Republican Conference Kevin McCarthy ran as its Leader. Republicans should have more than a bare House majority. McCarthy wanted one he could control.

How he got to be Speaker

Shortly after that disastrous Midterm, several patriotic Representatives lined up to contend to be Speaker or support those who did. Among them were Reps. Bob Good (R-Va.), Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.), and Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) If he hadn’t had Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) to support him, he might never have made it. (Laura Loomer always felt McCarthy had worked on Greene with a combination of bribery and blackmail.)

But McCarthy did become Speaker, after agreeing to a large number of concessions. First and foremost, he agreed to a change in the House Rules. Among those changes was the restoration of the Motion to Vacate the Chair. Furthermore, under these new Rules, such a motion would be privileged, that is, requiring a vote within forty-eight hours of someone asking for such a vote. Other changes included requiring a three-fifth supermajority to increase taxes. The would-be Speaker made several other key promises, including:

• Passing twelve separate appropriations bills, not an Omnibus Bill or Continuing Resolution,
• Appointing key men to head the Judiciary and Oversight Committees, and
• Stripping Reps. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) of their committee assignments.

The House took fifteen votes to confirm the new Speaker. Before the fifteenth vote, McCarthy and Gaetz exchanged heated words. Then one of the new Speaker’s supporters almost landed physical blows on Gaetz. The final vote was 216-212, with Gaetz, Biggs, Rosendale, Good, Lauren Boebert (Colo.) and Eli Crane (R-Ariz.) voting “Present.”

How McCarthy lost his Speakership

The new Speaker made good on most of his promises as fast as he could. That included the public shaming of Schiff and Omar, and the appointment of Jim Jordan (Ohio) and James Comer (Ky.) to chair the Judiciary and Oversight Committees. Those two especially have made a lot of noise with their investigations of Biden and his family.

The Democrats came to despise the Speaker. Three of them accused him of weaponizing House committee assignments. More recently, they, too, accused him of making promises to them that he did not keep.

But Matt Gaetz grew livid when the Speaker started cutting “secret deals” with the Democrats on Ukraine funding. Then the Speaker made his worst mistake: agreeing to a Continuing Resolution.

So Gaetz announced a motion to vacate the chair on Monday (October 2) at 7:38 p.m. EDT.

First came a motion to lay the motion to vacate on the table. It failed, 208-218. Tellingly, not a single Democrat voted for the motion to table.

After that, the debate and vote on the motion to vacate took three hours and twelve minutes.

The motion carried, 216-210. Eight Republicans joined all the Democratic members present in voting in favor.

• Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.),
• Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.),
• Eli Crane (R-Ariz.),
• Ken Buck (R-Colo.),
• Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.),
• Nancy Mace (R-S.C.),
• Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.), and
• Bob Good (R-Va.).

And the crybaby performance begins at once!

Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), Speaker pro tempore, actually presided over the vote. After announcing it, he invited McCarthy to make a concession speech. He did:

Actually, the former Speaker behaved like a gentleman.

Nothing in his [career] / Became him like the leaving it.

MacBeth I.iv.8-9, paraphrase.

Not so McHenry. As his first official act, he put the House into recess until October 10. Holding the gavel after the concession speech, he declaimed,

The House is in recess, subject to the call of the Chair.

He then brought his gavel down on the strike plate with a violent force that should have chipped the dais. Miraculously, it did not. But Rep. Gaetz immediately seized on the gesture, and its meaning.

To Newsmax’ Eric Bolling, he said:

We should be here tomorrow, working to elect a new Speaker, getting onto our appropriations bills, and engaging in a negotiation with the Senate to get the government funded. But instead…! Whoa! These people have to go home and cry for a week? They’ve got to do a week of hand-wringing and bed-wetting over the fact that Kevin McCarthy isn’t Speaker anymore? This institution is about more than one man. It’s about the job.

Former Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) had his own harsh words for Gaetz and his colleague:

Rep. Austin Scott (R-Ga.) echoed a common refrain about throwing Gaetz out of the House Republican Conference.

Evidently Scott didn’t listen to Gaetz telling that Conference he could fund-raise from small donors just as well.

Throw him out of the Conference, and he no longer has to pay Conference dues. Which, as The John Birch Society likes to say, amount to a Member’s annual salary.

OK, what next?

Beyond such petulant gestures, the common thread in the canards the establishment is throwing at Gaetz, is that he had no definite candidate for the Speakership in mind to endorse, if his motion carried – which, of course, it did. Gaetz has indicated he will not be a candidate for the Speakership.

(To his credit, McHenry did send an official letter to Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., giving her notice to vacate the small office she kept in the Capitol as Speaker. He even said he would have the door re-keyed, which is modern parlance for changing the locks.)

Speculation on the next Speaker now centers on three men above all. One is Rep. Jordan, Chairman of the Judiciary Committee. In fact he is already circulating a letter asking for votes.

Gaetz shared on X his speech in January nominating Jim Jordan for Speaker then.

Another is Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), House Majority Leader and therefore technically next in line. But Laura Loomer warns that he has taken contributions (bribes?) from Bill Gates.

The third man is Donald Trump. Nothing in the Constitution says the Speaker must be a member; only custom and tradition dictate that. Already Trump is attracting House endorsements. One has come from Rep. Greene:

Laura Loomer does not believe it.

Trump himself trolled everybody today at 3:23 p.m. EDT with this retouch of himself holding the Speaker’s gavel.

Summing up

Toward the end of the afternoon, Gaetz left this post that summed up his motives:

The House must vote for a new Speaker next week, as nothing can happen in a House without a Speaker.

Americans saw the making of history. Never before has the House removed its Speaker in mid-term, though several have resigned rather than face such a vote. The last time a motion to vacate came to the floor was in 1910. Rep. Joe Cannon (R-Ill., of House Office Building fame), then Speaker, introduced a motion to vacate the chair against himself. As he predicted, the motion failed, 155-192. In 2015, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) filed a motion to vacate the chair against Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). The House referred that to the Rules Committee, but Boehner resigned before it could ever come to a vote.

Commenting on this historic moment, one observer remarked on the strength, or staying power, of the Republican insurgency:

CNAV seconds that. And to the crybaby RINOs still asking what happened, CNAV closes with this.