He United States Congress This Tuesday he entered the chaospushed by the rebellion of a group of representatives of the far right against the leader of the Republican majority in the Lower House, Kevin McCarthy. He ‘speaker’ has not passed a motion to remove him from office that the Florida congressman had presented the day before Matt Gaetz. Eight Republicans from that ultra faction have joined 208 Democrats and have managed to approve the motion to leave vacant the position, which 210 Republicans have opposed.
McCarthy has thus become the first speaker of the House of Representatives expelled from that position, second in line of presidential succession. And the US enters a moment not only of dysfunction and chaos but of uncertainty and days, or perhaps weeks, of legislative paralysis, an extremely complex situation that endangers, for example, progress in the approval of the budget to keep the government operationalthat must be approved before November 17.
Paralysis for at least a week
For now, At least for seven days the Lower House will not be able to carry out its functions. Because after McCarthy’s dismissal, a Interim speaker, Patrick McHenry, which has immediately put the House on recess so that the two parties can now determine the path forward. But the only authority of that president temporary is to organize the election of the new president of the House. And in a meeting with the Republican conference this Tuesday afternoon McHenry has called conservatives for another meeting on Tuesday of next week, where they should decide their candidate, and There won’t be a vote until at least next Wednesday.
The Democrats will present Hakeem Jeffries, the minority leader, as their candidate, but they do not have the votes to get him elected. And Republicans still don’t know who can unify their conference.
The name that will not be safe in that candidacy is McCarthy. At the meeting of Republicans after his dismissal, the Californian announced his decision not to run againsomething that he later explained in a press conference, in which he also defended his work in the position from which he has now been expelled. “I would not change anything”McCarthy said.
In that appearance before the media he blamed the Democrats more for his expulsion and accused them of damaging the institution. And he has criticized them more harshly than the eight Republicans who have managed to expel him, although he has called those fellow members “angry and chaotic“. And he has made no secret of his disdain for Gaetz and for their motivations.”Everything has been for get attention”he said, attributing to the Florida congressman a “personal” crusade and not political and disgraceful that he has used the motion to try to raise funds.
An internal war
The unprecedented episode in American politics and the last hours, which have included a debate before the motion in which only Republicans have intervened facing each other, represent the culmination of the intense internal war open between factions of the conservative partybut they also expose the price that the training must pay for your radicalization since Donald Trump’s emergence into leadership.
Because on the one hand most radical congressmen aligned with the former president and candidate for 2024, despite being a minority in the Lower House that the Republicans control with a fragile majority after the last legislative elections, have gained a excessive power, which has been demonstrated with the success of his motion and in a previous vote in which 11 Republicans joined 207 Democrats to defeat the last attempt to abort Gaetz’s motion. But on the other Democrats have refused to save McCarthy, a politician who has aligned much of his agenda with the radicalized positions of Trump and his acolytes, has recently approved the opening of a process to try to impeach Joe Bidenand which they claim cannot be trusted.
A rebellion in slow motion
The vote this weekend on a measure that gave a 45-day extension to the budget and avoided a government shutdown in extremis was the last straw that, at least on paper, broke the camel’s back for Gaetz and the rest of the radical group. McCarthy pushed the law through the House with more Democratic votes than Republicans. And although the law excluded aid to Ukraine, Gaetz has accused McCarhty of having reached a “secret pact” with the Democrats and Biden to ensure that more assistance will be approved for kyiv, which the ultraconservative wing opposes.
The rebellion, in any case, comes from further away. In January McCarthy had to do concessions to the ultras to become president of the House after an agonizing and humiliating process in which he needed 15 rounds of voting. Already then the convulsion was predicted. And despite having taken legislative steps in these months to appease them, including opening the process to try to impeach Biden, or moving away from commitments that he reached with the White House in the agreement with which the ceiling of the debt and prevented the US from defaulting, has not stopped the rebellion.
One possibility for him to save his position lay in the fact that the democrats They would support him, either actively or passively, by absenting themselves from the vote on Gaetz’s motion or by voting only “present.” and lowering the necessary majority. But after hours of intense conversations it was Of course the Democrats were not going to be the ones to save him. In a letter that Hakeem Jeffries, Democratic minority leader, sent to his caucus, the position of the leadership was announced, which had already been debated in a previous two-hour meeting, which opened with a video showing McCarthy on the same Sunday trying to blame them for having brought the government closer to a closure despite the fact that they gave him more votes on Saturday than his own bench. And Jeffries used as an argument against McCarthy and the Republicans his ““lack of will to truly and completely break with MAGA extremism,” the acronym of the Make America Great Again movement allied with Trump.
Trump’s silence
He former presidentmeanwhile, has maintained publicly silent about what happened. In New York for the second day of the civil trial he faces for accusations of fraud in his business organization, he only posted a message on his social network Truth Social hours before the vote in which McCarthy was expelled. In that message he asked “why Republicans always fight among themselves” instead of against Democrats. His name should appear in the answer he has not given.
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