The House speaker surrendered every principle, and in the end, it still wasn’t enough to save him.
“The office of speaker of the House of the United States House of Representatives is hereby declared vacant.”
With those words, uttered in the well of the House on Tuesday afternoon, Kevin McCarthy’s reign as speaker came to an inglorious end. McCarthy is the first speaker in history to be removed by his own party; eight Republicans voted to dethrone him, along with all 208 Democrats who were present and voting. McCarthy goes down as having served the shortest speakership since the 1870s.
McCarthy’s defeat was the result of a bitter power struggle within the GOP, and especially due to the efforts of Representative Matt Gaetz, a hard-right rebel, who forced the vote. The House is now without a speaker, and more chaos is sure to follow. The GOP still holds the House majority, but it is a deeply riven and dysfunctional party.
I consider Matt Gaetz to be a maliciously cynical lawmaker, but I can’t say I’m sorry to see McCarthy deposed. After all, he has been one of the key figures in transforming the GOP into a monstrous political party, one whose contempt for constitutional and democratic norms poses the greatest threat to the Republic since the Civil War.
McCarthy was one of 147 Republicans who voted to overturn the 2020 election results—a vote that took place just hours after the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Privately, McCarthy said he would call for Trump’s resignation—“I’ve had it with this guy,” he told other Republican leaders—but once it became clear the Republican base wouldn’t break with Trump, McCarthy did an about-face. He went on bended knee to Mar-a-Lago less than two weeks after Trump incited the insurrection. McCarthy saw rehabilitating Trump as his job, and to some degree succeeded within the GOP; since that visit, he’s done everything in his power to defend the former president. McCarthy was careful never to get crosswise of Trump, aware of what a dominant figure Trump is within the Republican party.
