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A hardline Republican lawmaker says he will oust House Speaker Kevin McCarthy next week as he works with Democrats to strike a last-minute deal to avert a government shutdown.
Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz said Sunday he would force a vote to oust McCarthy from his leadership position in the Republican-controlled lower chamber of the Legislature by filing a “motion to resign.”
“Speaker McCarthy reached an agreement with House conservatives in January, and he has blatantly and repeatedly violated that agreement ever since,” he told CNN. “This deal that he made with Democrats really broke down a lot of the spending guardrails that we had in place, and that was the last straw.”
He added: “I think we need to rip the Band-Aid off. I think we need to move forward with new leadership that we can trust.”
Gaetz’s latest attack came after weeks of threats after U.S. lawmakers narrowly avoided a government shutdown that would have shut down a wide range of government services, furloughed hundreds of thousands of federal workers and halted military pay.
The deal gives the government access to funds for another 45 days but stops short of billions of dollars in aid for Ukraine. This comes after a sudden reversal by McCarthy, who joined forces with Democrats to overcome determined opposition from some die-hard Republicans.
The House ultimately approved the deal by a vote of 335 to 91. All but one Democratic House member joined a majority of Republicans in supporting the measure, while 90 Republicans broke with McCarthy and opposed the deal.
The Senate subsequently approved the bill in an 88-9 vote on Saturday night, and President Joe Biden signed it shortly before the midnight deadline.
Some House Democrats also expressed support for ousting McCarthy on Sunday, with New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez saying she would “absolutely” vote to remove McCarthy.
“I think Kevin McCarthy is a very weak speaker,” she told CNN. “He has clearly lost control of the caucus. He brought the country and millions of Americans to the brink, waiting until the last minute to keep the government open, but even then he only issued a 45-day extension .”
Another House Democrat, Hillary Scholten of Michigan, would not say whether she would vote against McCarthy but noted that “there are some serious trust issues here.”
“If he wants Democrats to come to the table and help keep him speaker, we need to have some concrete guidelines,” she told CNN.
McCarthy said he was confident he could take on the challenge, telling CBS News: “I’m going to survive.”
He called Gaetz’s threats “personal,” adding that his colleague was “more interested in getting a television interview.”
This is not the first challenge McCarthy has faced. He was elected speaker in January after 15 votes over five days.
Gaetz predicts Democrats will “bail out Kevin McCarthy.”
“So, this is an exercise to show the American people who really rules over you and how that rule works,” he told ABC News on Sunday.
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