Kevin McCarthy managed to avoid a government shutdown on Saturday when he approved a Continuing Resolution (CR) with a majority of Democrats and Republicans. This did not go down very well among conservatives in the House of Representatives, especially among those who had McCarthy in their sights from the beginning. One of them is Matt Gaetz, who has already announced that he will present a motion to remove the Speaker of the House.
For Gaetz, McCarthy is not trustworthy and he proved it to him in the last round of negotiations with the opponents. Therefore, as he has been threatening in recent months, he will try to replace him and look for a leader who, in his vision, is closer to the most conservative faction of the Republican Party.
"I do intend to file a motion to vacate against Speaker McCarthy this week. I think we have to rip off the band-aid. I think we need to move on with new leadership that can be trustworthy. The one thing everybody has in common is that nobody trusts Kevin McCarthy. He lied to Biden, he lied to House conservatives. He had appropriators marking to a different number altogether. And the reason we were backed up against the shutdown politics is not a bug of the system. It’s a feature," he said in an interview with CNN about his plans.
I will file a motion to vacate against @SpeakerMcCarthy this week. pic.twitter.com/kFA7X7P2OG
— Rep. Matt Gaetz (@RepMattGaetz) October 1, 2023
How does the impeachment motion work?
When McCarthy was in the middle of the fight for the gavel, he granted the internal opposition, precisely led by Gaetz, to reduce the number of congressmen necessary to initiate a motion to remove the Speaker of the House.
The negotiation concluded that a single legislator would be necessary to do so, whether Republican, Democrat or independent. He must "offer a privileged resolution declaring the Office of the Speaker vacant," thus initiating the procedure.
To officially fire McCarthy, the Florida congressman must gather a simple majority (half plus one), in this case, 218 colleagues. Once it starts, procedural votes can be stopped and annulled if agreed upon by a simple majority.
Therefore, if all or almost all Democrats join the conservatives in the House they could have the votes necessary to vacate the speaker, although, at least from the beginning, this does not seem to be a likely scenario.
Although it does not exist in the text of the National Constitution, the impeachment motion is based on "Jefferson's Manual", which the House adopted in 1837 as a guide to parliamentary procedure. According to the manual, "a speaker may be removed at the pleasure of the House," the manual says.
In turn, it was Joseph Cannon, Speaker of the House in 1910, who launched the modern impeachment motion.
The last impeachment motion was successful
The last time it was presented was in 2015 and was authored by Mark Meadows, who later served as Donald Trump's chief of staff. On that occasion, Meadows was successful, John Boehmer resigned as Speaker of the House.
After a parade of candidates including McCarthy himself, the Republicans ended up choosing Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.
