House Speaker Kevin McCarthy dared Rep. Matt Gaetz to ‘bring it on’ after the Florida Republican said he would bring up the motion to oust him this week.
‘I’ll survive,’ McCarthy said of the news on ABC Sunday morning. ‘Bring it on. Let’s get over with it.’
‘I do intend to file a motion to vacate against Speaker McCarthy this week,’ Gaetz had said on CNN Sunday morning. ‘I think we need to rip off the Band-Aid. I think we need to move on with new leadership that can be trustworthy.’
The Florida Republican has long said that if McCarthy put a ‘clean’ continuing resolution, or CR, on the House floor, he would file the motion.
During the frenzied 15-ballot speaker’s vote McCarthy agreed to a single-member motion to vacate, meaning one member of Congress can force a vote on the House floor to oust him as speaker.
McCarthy has accused Gaetz of having a personal vendetta against him because the Florida Republican is under investigation by the Ethics Committee.
‘This is personal with Matt,’ McCarthy said Sunday. ‘[Gaetz] is more interested in securing TV interviews than doing something. He wanted to push us into a shutdown.’
‘I do intend to file a motion to vacate against Speaker McCarthy this week,’ Gaetz said on CNN Sunday morning. ‘I think we need to rip off the Band-Aid. I think we need to move on with new leadership that can be trustworthy’
GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz said he will bring up a motion to oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy next week, just after the House passed a spending bill that narrowly avoided a government shutdown
In order for him to be removed from the job Gaetz would need to garner 218 votes. Most Republicans would likely vote no on the measure, meaning many of those votes would need to come from Democrats.
‘I’m done owning Kevin McCarthy,’ Gaetz said. The speaker met with Gaetz over the past few weeks to try to navigate a path forward on spending that the rightward flank could support.
‘I’m not owning him anymore, because he doesn’t tell the truth,’ said Gaetz.
He predicted his own motion would fail because some Democrats would vote to keep McCarthy in the speaker’s chair.
‘The only way Kevin McCarthy is speaker of the House at the end of this coming week is if Democrats bail him out. Now they probably will.’
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., told CNN on Sunday she would ‘absolutely’ vote to vacate the chair.
And Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., seemed open to supporting the motion to vacate on Fox News Sunday morning.
‘I don’t know right now. I got to really think about that,’ he said. ‘There are a lot of trust issues in my chamber right now.’
After trying to wrangle Republican votes on a party-line CR that would have cut spending and included border policies but never made it through the Senate, McCarthy finally caved and put a bipartisan CR on the House floor on Saturday – hours before the deadline to shutdown.
The bill extends government funding at 2023 levels set under Democrats last Congress for six weeks, giving both chambers more time to hash out a longer-term spending plan.
It includes disaster funding but no new aid for Ukraine.
Gaetz, however, accused McCarthy of making a ‘secret deal’ with Democrats to vote on Ukraine funding later on.
A statement from House Democratic leadership said they ‘expect’ McCarthy to advance a Ukraine funding bill – though it’s not clear if the speaker has agreed to that.
‘When the House returns, we expect Speaker McCarthy to advance a bill to the House Floor for an up-or-down vote that supports Ukraine, consistent with his commitment to making sure that Vladimir Putin, Russia and authoritarianism are defeated. We must stand with the Ukrainian people until victory is won.’
Senate leaders said they expect to have a Ukraine bill on the floor ‘in the coming weeks’ and President Biden also said he expected Congress to approve more funding.
‘I fully expect the speaker will keep his commitment to the people of Ukraine and secure passage of the support needed to help Ukraine at this critical moment,’ Biden said.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Dailymail.co.uk
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