Pelosi brushes off Matt Gaetz’s threat to McCarthy’s speakership while AOC says she would ‘absolutely’ vote to oust him

Nancy Pelosi  brushed off Rep. Matt Gaetz‘s threats to Kevin McCarthy‘s speakership because the Florida Republican has no ‘sway’ in the House. 

‘You’re wasting your time on that guy because he has no sway in the House. Except to get on TV and to raise money on the internet,’ Pelosi told CNN’s State of the Union.

Pelosi was speaker from 2007 to 2011 and again from 2019 to 2023. 

Gaetz announced his motion to vacate the speakership is imminent on Sunday.  

‘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.’

While questions remain over whether Democrats would bail out McCarthy in a vote to oust him, Pelosi implored them to take cues from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. 

‘Follow the leader,’ she said. 

Pelosi also said Gaetz was ‘fraud’ for claiming the reason he was bringing the motion to the floor was because McCarthy put a bipartisan deal to fund the government on the House floor. 

‘It’s such a fraud when they say the basis of this is about spending. These are people who gave a tax cut to the richest people in America,’ she said.  

Pelosi has reportedly warned Jeffries to be cautious about bailing out McCarthy because of concerns that he can’t be trusted. 

But Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has already decided she’ll be voting with Gaetz against the speaker. 

‘Absolutely,’ she said when asked the question. ‘I think Kevin McCarthy is a very weak speaker. He clearly has lost control of his caucus.’ 

She predicted her caucus would have to extract major concessions from the speaker in order for Democrats to vote to keep him. 

‘I certainly don’t think that we would expect to see that unless there’s a real conversation between the Republican and Democratic caucuses,’ she said. ‘I don’t think we [will] give up votes for free.’

Gaetz has long said that if McCarthy put a ‘clean’ continuing resolution, or CR, on the House floor, he would file the motion. 

‘I’ll survive,’ McCarthy said of the news on ABC Sunday morning. ‘Bring it on. Let’s get over with it.’

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.

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.’ 

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.’ 

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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