The removal of US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is a dysfunctional attempt by a handful of Republicans to defy the overwhelming bulk of their conference, says Bloomberg Opinion’s Jonathan Bernstein.
Kevin McCarthy speaks to reporters hours after he was ousted as Speaker of the House on Oct 3, 2023, at the Capitol in Washington. from his leadership position on Tuesday by a small group of radical members of his own party, led by Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida.
Gaetz exercised a little-known procedure that hadn’t been used in more than one hundred 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. While the vote showed he had the support of the vast majority of the conference, it’s difficult to see how he would have mounted a comeback. It took a tortuous 15 ballots for him to win the job back 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 last time there was an attempt to remove a speaker was 1910, when Republicans tried to oust Speaker Joseph Cannon of Illinois.
And it’s about the remainder of the House Republicans who haven’t 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. And the dysfunction is getting worse, regardless of how the speaker fight plays out.
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