Despite calls by conservative activists to oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy for his debt deal with President Joe Biden, it is highly unlikely that he will be ousted from his post. At any time, a member of Congress can call for a point of order to vacate the speaker’s chair.
McCarthy made the best of a bad situation. He faced a president who did not want to cut a deal and the Sword of Damocles hanging over the nation’s head in the event of default. Seventy-one Republicans voted against the deal out of the 222-member GOP conference.
He won the debt deal vote by a 314-117 vote with the help of Democrats. The Washington Post noted that House Freedom Caucus members including Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Jim Jordan voted for the deal.
McCarthy Caught Between Scylla and Charybdis
He faced the unfavorable task of having to find a compromise with a president named Joe Biden who did not want to compromise. It was like being caught between Scylla and Charybdis, between the bad option of default and Joe Biden’s insistence on the status quo.
Under the deal, the debt ceiling will be raised to $34 trillion, and the next chance of potential default will be in early 2025 after the election.
Under the deal, $1.4 billion in funding to the IRS would be rescinded, over $1 trillion would be cut over the next decade in projected spending, and $27 billion in unspent COVID funding would be returned to the Treasury.
“My beef is that you cut a deal that shouldn’t have been cut,” House Freedom Caucus Member Rep. Chip Roy said.
Republicans’ History of Revolting Against Their Speakers
Republicans have controlled the House of Representatives for all but eight of the past 28 years and have ousted two speakers amid discontent in their ranks.
Former House Speaker John Boehner resigned in 2015 as Speaker of the House after facing a conservative challenge led by the Congressional Freedom Caucus led by now House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan and now Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Newt Gingrich was ousted in 1998 after the GOP lost seats in that year’s midterm election amid a revolt.
McCarthy knows his slim majority gives him little room to navigate his caucus, so he has to do his best to avoid his predecessors’ fates.
McCarthy Safe For Now
At this point, Republicans are holding back.
Washington, D.C. radio host Larry O’Connor said Thursday morning on his show on WMAL that he had spoken with several members of Congress who told him that ousting McCarthy was off the table for now.
“In other words: McCarthy was negotiating with a lying, duplicitous Kamikaze who was more than willing to crash his jet into the nation’s economy knowing the compliant national media would blame House Republicans even though they were the only political entity in DC acting responsibly and constitutionally in the past five months,” O’Connor wrote in his TownHall.com column on Wednesday. “McCarthy recognized the situation he was in, and he probably got the best possible deal he could muster in a nearly impossible situation.”
John Rossomando was a senior analyst for Defense Policy and served as Senior Analyst for Counterterrorism at The Investigative Project on Terrorism for eight years. His work has been featured in numerous publications such as The American Thinker, The National Interest, National Review Online, Daily Wire, Red Alert Politics, CNSNews.com, The Daily Caller, Human Events, Newsmax, The American Spectator, TownHall.com, and Crisis Magazine. He also served as senior managing editor of The Bulletin, a 100,000-circulation daily newspaper in Philadelphia, and received the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors first-place award for his reporting.
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