House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.) has instructed his caucus not to support any motions to delay the intra-GOP effort to oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) from his leadership position, and is even going so far as to urge Democrats to affirmatively vote against the embattled speaker.
With at least five Republican rebels expected to join Representative Matt Gaetz’s (R., Fla.) effort to oust McCarthy, the speaker needs the support of nearly the entire Democratic caucus to defeat Gaetz’s motion to vacate, which he introduced Monday night.
But Jeffries is holding is caucus together and instructing them not to save McCarthy, Punchbowl News’s Jake Sherman reported. Rather than voting for or against the motion to vacate, Democrats could also skip the vote or vote present, lowering the threshold required for McCarthy to survive.
Despite the latest development, McCarthy told reporters, “I’m confident I’ll hold on.”
“At the end of the day, if you throw a speaker out that has 99 percent of their conference, that kept government open, that paid the troops, I think we’re in a really bad place for how we’re going to run Congress,” McCarthy said.
The Democratic minority leader’s comments come less than a day after Gaetz first filed a motion to vacate McCarthy from the speakership, making good on weeks of threatening to do just that. When filing the motion Monday evening, the Florida Republican accused the House speaker of striking a “secret, side deal” with President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party on Ukraine funding to avert a government shutdown.
“It is becoming increasingly clear who the Speaker of the House already works for and it’s not the Republican Conference,” Gaetz said on the House floor.
The stopgap spending bill was passed late Saturday before the shutdown deadline, giving Congress an extra 45 days to come to a long-term agreement on funding the federal government in fiscal year 2024. The new deadline is set for November 17.
The House will vote Tuesday afternoon on a motion to table Gaetz’s effort against McCarthy. If the motion to table fails, the House will proceed to a vote on the motion to vacate. The vote is set to start around 1:30 p.m. Tuesday.
If the motion to vacate passes, McCarthy will be out and the House will proceed to voting on his replacement. It remains unclear who the likely successor will be, though Representatives Tom Emmer of Minnesota and Tom Cole of Oklahoma have been floated by rank-and-file Republicans.