House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is facing a bitterly divided House GOP caucus as a slow-burning MAGA campaign to derail his speakership bid boiled over during a closed-door meeting last week with dissenters vowing to deny the California Republican the votes he’ll need to become speaker.
Citing three people who attended the meeting, CNN reported that “the House Republican Conference is still entrenched in an internal war over whether to reinstate an arcane rule that would empower any member to bring up a vote to oust a speaker at any time.”
For McCarthy’s backers, the so-called motion to vacate is seen as little more than a promise of hostage-taking, a tool that could be used by the right flank to hamstring McCarthy’s ability to lead the conference and effectively govern.
“There’s a reason [the motion to vacate] already got debated. You can’t govern with a gun to your head and that is what they are asking for. It makes us highly unstable, and it lays out the potential too for Democrats to take advantage of this and create absolute chaos,” Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a Texas Republican, told CNN.
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He added: “There is a reason people are against it. You can scream the word accountability all you want … in the end, it’s just a path to chaos, not stability, and we are going to have to be very united and very stable if we are going to govern properly. “
As noted by CNN, McCarthy still doesn’t have the votes to be the next speaker of the House, raising questions as to whether Republicans may go to the floor on January 3 unsure if the votes will be there to elect him as speaker.
And with just a few weeks before January 3, the so-called motion to vacate may be the only way McCarthy can convince some members to fall in line behind him.
