Matt Gaetz’s moment of truth is here. Just ask him.
After months of threatening to topple House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the 41-year-old GOP renegade vowed Monday to plow ahead with a mutiny attempt later this week during a blustery speech on the House floor.
“It is going to be difficult for my Republican friends to keep calling President Biden feeble while he continues to take Speaker McCarthy’s lunch money in every negotiation,” Gaetz (R-Fla.) told a largely empty chamber shortly after noon.
Gaetz didn’t actually put forward his promised motion to vacate the chair — parliamentary parlance for booting McCarthy (R-Calif.) from the speakership — but promised it was coming soon.
And if it fails, Gaetz warned, he may bring it back again and again.
“It took McCarthy 15 votes to become the speaker, so until I get to 14 or 15, I don’t think I’m being any more dilatory than he was,” he quipped to reporters on the Capitol steps after his remarks.
But as the Sunshine State gadfly goes for the jugular, he is increasingly finding his colleagues’ political knives unsheathed and pointed at him — with some even mulling legislation to expel Gaetz pending the outcome of a House Ethics Committee investigation, a possibility the lawmaker has both decried and used as a fundraising hook.
“No one can stand him at this point,” one lawmaker told Fox News over the weekend. “A smart guy without morals.”
“This is personal with Matt,” McCarthy told CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “He’s more interested in securing TV interviews than doing something.”
McCarthy has publicly alleged that Gaetz’s animosity toward him stems from the speaker’s refusal to meddle in the ethics probe — something Gaetz vehemently denies.
Gaetz’s motion needs a simple majority to succeed in unseating McCarthy, an outcome he could accomplish if enough House Democrats decide they want the Californian gone.
The Florida rep has publicly ruled out cutting any deals across the aisle, positing Democrats will help depose McCarthy for free.
“No one trusts Kevin McCarthy,” Gaetz told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. “He has lied to everyone.”
Democrats have been irritated by McCarthy’s antics, especially his apparent reneging on the top-line spending figures agreed to in this year’s debt limit deal.
While some of them have publicly indicated they’d pursue concessions from McCarthy in exchange for throwing him a lifeline, moderate Democrats have expressed skepticism of doing the bidding of the chief GOP agitator.
“I think that this is about the institution. I think it’s too important,” McCarthy told reporters Monday, sidestepping questions about whether he’d cut a deal with Democrats to save his skin.
Over the weekend, the speaker claimed Democrats had “tried to do everything they can not to let [the bill to prevent a shutdown] pass.”
McCarthy also hinted that he wants to tweak the rules surrounding a motion to vacate in order to prevent Gaetz or others from weaponizing it in the future. Back in January, he agreed to lower the threshold to bring forward that motion to one.
“It would have to be changed to make that, otherwise he can do dilatory actions like this and it could move every two days,” McCarthy told Fox News Sunday.
Gaetz is keeping his cards close to the vest about when this week he intends to drop the motion to vacate.
On Monday he demanded that McCarthy come clean about any deal he may have struck with Democrats about funding for Ukraine.
Over the weekend, House Democratic leadership and President Biden appeared to imply that a bill on Ukraine funding was on the horizon. On Sunday, the speaker was seemingly noncommittal and appeared to condition bringing up such a bill on pairing Ukraine funding with border security.
Biden on Monday evaded questions from reporters about whether he had struck a deal with McCarthy on Ukraine support.
The use of a motion to vacate to challenge a House speaker’s position hasn’t happened since 1910, when then-Speaker Joseph Cannon (R-Ill.) survived an attempt to force his ouster.
“Republicans need to get off the power trips, stop the absurd drama, remember who the enemy is, stop fighting with each other, and get serious about solving the problems that produce annual systemic failure,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) posted on social media in a lengthy thread in which she announced opposition to both removing McCarthy and expelling Gaetz.
Many of her colleagues were less charitable toward the Floridian.
“I don’t have time nor patience nor tolerance for some sort of psycho-pseudo-political fetish,” Rep. Marc Molinaro (R-NY) told WAMC radio in Albany Monday.
“I think we’ve got to get the drama aside. I think Matt has depreciated the value of this motion to vacate threat to zero. The only value it has left is if he actually does pull the trigger. We’ll see if he does that this week,” Rep. Mike Garcia (R-Calif.) told Fox Business Network.
One of McCarthy’s allies, Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.) says he has drafted his own motion to vacate to undercut Gaetz and “get this over with.”
A chorus of prominent conservative luminaries have also ripped into Gaetz.
“The guy who says McCarthy is the Democrats’ speaker is plotting and scheming with the radical Democrats to take out a Republican speaker who is more conservative than he is,” radio host Mark Levin chided on X, formerly known as Twitter.
“Is Gaetz secretly an agent for the Democratic Party? No one else is doing as much to undermine, weaken and cripple the House GOP,” added former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
Right-leaning conservative activist group Freedomworks President Adam Brandon also panned Gaetz.
“What the [millennial] voters, who Republicans need to win elections, want to see Congress doing its job -passing all appropriations bills-not forcing a chamber to waste its time engaging in a personality conflict,” he said.
Some moderate Democrats made their annoyance with Gaetz clear as well.
“Every time we all work together, he loses his mind. He doesn’t want the center-left and center-right to work together because he has to be the center of attention,” Rep. Greg Landsman (D-Ohio) said in a statement.
“When we do, he creates chaos to grab attention back. Matt Gaetz has no interest in governing. This is all about TV appearances for him. If he says it’s for any other reason, he’s lying. Just let us govern, which is what most of us came here to do.”