McCarthy Will Not Run For House Speaker Again After Being Ousted
After Rep. Matt Gaetz’s (R-FL) motion to remove Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) from the speakership succeeded on Tuesday, McCarthy announced that he will not be running for Speaker of the House again.
Reps. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Ken Buck (R-CO, Tim Burchett (R-TN), Eli Crane (R-AZ), Bob Good (R-VA), Nancy Mace (R-SC), Matt Rosendale (R-MT) and every House Democrat voted alongside Gaetz to oust McCarthy. The motion succeeded by a 216-210 vote.
Punchbowl News reporter Jake Sherman broke the news that McCarthy had decided not to run for the speakership again after being ousted. Sherman revealed in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, that McCarthy planned to “make the announcement in closed GOP meeting.”
While speaking on the House floor prior to the vote, Gaetz explained his decision to remove the House Speaker. The Florida Republican was forced to speak from the Democrat side of the chamber after McCarthy’s allies blocked the microphones on the Republican side.
“I take no lecture from those who would grovel and bend knee for the lobbyists and special interests who own our leadership, hollow out this town, and borrow against the future of our future generations,” he wrote in the post.
Gaetz also noted in his speech that he was fine with funding his campaign with small donations from “patriotic Americans” — as his decision to remove McCarthy has prompted establishment RINOs to demand that Republican campaign committees and PACs refuse to contribute to Gaetz’s future campaigns.
“You all keep showing up at the lobbyists’ fundraisers and see how that goes for you,” he added, speaking to the establishment Republicans that booed him earlier in his speech.
Gaetz spoke with reporters after the vote, where he stated that “it is to the benefit of this country that we have a better Speaker of the House than Kevin McCarthy.”
“The reason Kevin McCarthy went down today is because nobody trusts Kevin McCarthy. Kevin McCarthy has made multiple contradictory promises, and when they all came due, he lost votes of people who maybe don’t even ideologically agree with me on everything,” Gaetz later added.
“This represents the ripping off of the Band-Aid and that’s what we need to do to get back on track,” he continued.
Conservatives celebrated McCarthy’s ouster on X — with popular account “Catturd” summarizing the feelings of conservative voters in a long post calling out McCarthy and his supporters.
“I don’t care what anyone says … We’ve fought for 10 years and not one establishment, lying, uniparty fraud has ever been held accountable until today. Listen, you can’t shake things up unless you shake things up. I’m so disappointed in Marjorie Taylor Green and Lauren Boebert for this vote today. They’ve been preaching against the swamp for years and they finally had a chance to actually get rid of one of Washington DC’s biggest swamp creatures – and they folded like cheap tents. Hopefully, the uniparty will think twice in the future about lying to We The People,” the post read.
