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When Kevin McCarthy was making concessions to the right-wing House Freedom Caucus in January to become speaker, perhaps the most talked-about lever he gave away was the “motion to vacate the chair.” The opposition demanded — and received — the right of a single member to force a vote to try to remove McCarthy as speaker.
This rule has existed for a long time, but it took on new resonance not that long ago, even playing a role in House Speaker John A. Boehner’s 2015 resignation. Staff for Boehner’s successor, Paul D. Ryan, labeled the rule a “weapon pointed at” the speaker “all the time.” The message to McCarthy was unmistakable: If you don’t toe our line, we will wield that weapon.
After five months of relative harmony between them, the clash between McCarthy and the hard right we all knew would come has arrived, with the Freedom Caucus decrying McCarthy’s debt ceiling deal with President Biden. But save for a few comments here or there, they’ve declined to truly use the motion to vacate as leverage.
All of which reinforces both the limits of it and the apparent goodwill that McCarthy has built up.
The motion to vacate rule traces back nearly two centuries, and it’s basically the equivalent of a vote of no confidence. It allows members to force a vote on the speaker’s removal, at which point a majority of the House is needed to actually oust them. The last time such votes were held was in 1910, when they failed. But it was threatened against Newt Gingrich in 1997, and then-Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows filed such a motion in 2015 before Boehner resigned. In 2019, Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi made it significantly more difficult to force such a vote, but the Freedom Caucus successfully pushed to undo those changes.
Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.) has been the most forthright about threatening to force a vote to remove McCarthy. He was the only Freedom Caucus member to raise his hand Tuesday when a reporter asked who supported a motion to vacate, and he has called it “inescapable.” But even he has suggested that the support — the “courage,” in his telling — might not be there.
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) has more obliquely pointed in this direction, saying that if the deal passes, there must be a “reckoning” and that “we’re going to have to then regroup and figure out the whole leadership arrangement again.” But he has declined to expressly threaten a motion to vacate.
Others, like Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.), have floated the possibility. But Buck has also suggested it’s too early to talk about it in earnest, before the bill even passes. So, too, have Rep. Andrew S. Clyde (R-Ga.) and House Freedom Caucus Chairman Scott Perry (R-Pa.). Perry punted on a question about it at the end of a news conference with his caucus Tuesday. But it’s an odd posture, given that the motion would seem to provide the most leverage before such an allegedly horrible bill passes.
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) has also spoken about a motion to vacate. But he suggested that it would come about only if most House Republicans voted against the deal, which he said would “be a black-letter violation of the deal we had with McCarthy.” We don’t yet know if that will actually be the case, though, and Gaetz suggested it wouldn’t.
Gaetz also conceded over the weekend that, “if there were a motion to vacate around this deal, it would undeniably fail. And people may or may not want to hear that, but it’s the truth.”
Which really gets to the heart of the matter.
Despite the big talk and the apocalyptic warnings from the right about what this debt ceiling deal portends — along with suggestions that McCarthy has reneged on his agreements — there just doesn’t appear to be the appetite to go down this road yet. Roy exclaimed that, “The Republican conference has been torn asunder.” But there’s little evidence that’s actually the case.
Even as the House Freedom Caucus assembled for 45 minutes to denounce the deal Tuesday and a protester behind them displayed a sign labeling McCarthy a “traitor,” McCarthy was largely spared the vitriol. When it was her turn to speak, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) even conceded, “I think McCarthy did the best that he could do to some extent with this deal. … McCarthy did his job, but unfortunately, Biden and the Democrat-controlled Senate did not do theirs.”
The choice before the Freedom Caucus is a difficult one. On the one hand, a single member can force such a vote, and the House GOP majority is so narrow that only a handful of Republicans would be needed to theoretically join with Democrats to oust McCarthy. And surely, if the debt deal is as dire as advertised, you would reach for every tool to try to stop it.
On the other, there’s little evidence that Democrats would actually help the right-wing Republicans, particularly after McCarthy and Biden were able to come together on the debt ceiling, and given that another speaker might not be as cooperative. (Axios has reported that some moderate Democrats were even talking about helping save McCarthy from a revolt.)
Forcing a vote would then be a recipe for failure — a failure that could actually strengthen McCarthy’s position within the conference. Even if Freedom Caucus types were more talk than walk, that would send a message about McCarthy’s standing.
And then there’s the question of what the Freedom Caucus would even get out of it. Their protestations notwithstanding, GOP strategist Liam Donovan suggests that it’s not much.
“The question for these guys is how and why a future speaker would be any better for them when the one who was exceedingly accommodating got no quarter,” Donovan said. He added that the Freedom Caucus needs to decide whether “their disappointment is worth blowing up what has been a pretty effective arrangement for them to date.”
Thus far, despite the Freedom Caucus’s demonstrated affinity for blowing things up to make a point, the answer appears to be no.
Source link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/05/31/mccarthys-critics-shy-away-threat-oust-him/