In 2015, House Speaker John Boehner resigned instead of trying to survive a House vote on whether to remain in office. Kevin McCarthy, then the second-ranked Republican, laughed at the time.
Now, McCarthy is serving as House speaker… but unlike Boehner, McCarthy will try to survive the vote.
“If somebody wants to remove (me) because I want to be the adult in the room, go ahead and try,” McCarthy told reporters Saturday.
By the end of the week, Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., plans to file a motion to vacate the speakership, the first step to replacing the House speaker.
“I think we need to rip off the Band-Aid,” Gaetz said Sunday on CNN. “I think we need to move on with new leadership that can be trustworthy.” Gaetz has yet to file the motion, as of Monday morning.
The rules of the House allow for any single lawmaker — Democrat or Republican — to make a “motion to vacate the chair,” essentially an attempt to oust the speaker from that leadership post.
At any point in time, a member of the House can introduce a privileged resolution —a designation that gives it priority over other measures — to declare the office of the speaker of the House of Representatives vacant.
Once the motion is introduced, the lawmaker can walk onto the House floor and request a vote. Such a request would force House leaders to schedule a vote on the resolution within two legislative days.
It’s a rare and strong procedural tool that has only been used twice in the past century. But in recent years, conservatives have wielded the motion as a weapon against their leaders.
In January, McCarthy, hoping to appease some on the hard right as he fought to gain their vote for speaker, agreed to give as few as five Republican members the ability to initiate a vote to remove him. But when that wasn’t good enough for his critics, he agreed to reduce that threshold to one — the system that historically has been the norm.
Proponents of allowing a single lawmaker to file the motion said it promotes accountability, noting its long history in the House.
The last use of the motion was in 2015, when then-Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina, a Republican who later became Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff, introduced a resolution to declare the speaker’s office vacant. Two months later, Boehner said he would be stepping down.
At the time, McCarthy said that he was different than Boehner. He laughed at suggestions that he might suffer a similar fate.
“Everybody is different,” McCarthy said at the time while praising Boehner. “There’s a generational difference.”
Take a look at this 2015 flashback —
No speaker has ever been removed from office through a motion to vacate. In fact, Republican Speaker Joseph Cannon filed a motion to vacate in 1910 during his own speakership. The House Republicans voted overwhelmingly to keep him as their leader, but by calling the bluff of his detractors, Cannon was able to put them on the record and end the threats against him.
McCarthy looks likely to pull a similar stunt. He’s dismissed Gaetz’s measure as a longshot.
“Yes, I’ll survive,” McCarthy said.
Gaetz threatened to file the motion after McCarthy procured some Democrat votes in order to fund the federal government until mid-November.
It would take a simple majority, 218 votes, to remove the speaker. The Republicans occupy 221 of the House’s 435 seats, and the Democrats have 212, with the remaining two seats currently vacant.
It remains unclear how the Democrats will vote.
“We haven’t had a discussion about any hypothetical motion to vacate,” Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said at a news conference Saturday. “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”
Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York said she would vote to oust McCarthy as speaker if such a vote occurs, calling him a “weak speaker” who had “lost control of his caucus.” But she also left open the opportunity for negotiations, saying that if there is Democratic support for McCarthy, it would come at a price.
“You don’t just vote for a Republican speaker for nothing. That’s not what we were elected here to do,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
Gaetz has been speaking to House Democrats from across the ideological spectrum in recent weeks trying to assess what kind of support, if any, he would have from those across the aisle if he were to file his motion and it came to the floor.
“The one thing I agree with my Democrat colleagues on is that for the last eight months, this House has been poorly led and we own that and we have to do something about it,” Gaetz said on the floor last week. “And you know what? My Democrat colleagues will have an opportunity to do something about that, too. And we will see if they bail out our failed speaker.”
“The only way Kevin McCarthy is speaker of the House at the end of this coming week is if Democrats bail him out,” Gaetz said.
The House would enter uncharted territory if a motion to vacate effort against McCarthy were to pass the full House.
The speaker of the House, under the rules of the chamber, is required to keep a list of individuals who can act as speaker pro tempore in the event a chair is vacated. The list, which is oddly written by the sitting speaker at any given time, remains with the House Clerk and would be made public if the speakership were vacant.
The first person on that list would be named speaker pro tempore and their first order of business would be to hold an election for a new speaker. That event requires the House to vote as many times as it takes for a candidate to receive the majority of those present and voting for speaker.
For McCarthy, that process took an unprecedented 15 rounds in January.
It remains unclear who else could win a speakership election… or who else would even want to be speaker.
Louisiana’s Steve Scalise, currently the No. 2 Republican, is suffering from health issues. The third-ranked Republican, Minnesota’s Tom Emmer, gave the Washington Post a statement denying all interest in the role.
New candidates for speaker could emerge, but there’s also nothing to stop McCarthy from running for speaker again.
The Horn editorial team and the Associated Press contribtued to this article.