What will really happen next if Matt Gaetz and his pals manage to remove Kevin McCarthy as Speaker this week

| 9:09 am EDT October 2, 2023
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Let’s game this out: it would only take six House Republicans (and all House Democrats) to remove Kevin McCarthy as Speaker. There are certainly more than six House Republicans who want McCarthy gone. But they know that if they do oust him, they’ll have a very difficult time finding 218 Republican votes for any replacement.

This could result in there being no Speaker for awhile. Then at some point the House Republicans in the toss-up races (the same ones who just forced McCarthy to cut a budget deal) would presumably decide that having no Speaker is too embarrassing and thus too injurious to their own reelection prospects. And the only way out for them would be to work with House Democrats on a compromise Speaker.

Keep in mind what the House Republicans in the toss-up races would want in a compromise Speaker. They presumably wouldn’t want to hand the Speakership to a powerful Democratic leader like Hakeem Jeffries. Instead they might be willing to support a “caretaker” Speaker – someone near the political middle who is respectable but also not seen as a threat to anyone. The point is not to try to guess the name. The point is that it would be someone lower profile whose name we probably couldn’t guess if we tried.

This would result in a Speaker who’s mainly beholden to the House Republicans in the toss-up districts, and somehow beholden to House Democrats, and not beholden at all to the sedition caucus.

So if Matt Gaetz really does find five other extremist House Republicans willing to help him oust McCarthy, they’d be doing it knowing that they’d likely end up with even less influence under the new Speaker. So it’s a question of whether they’re willing to weaken their own position out of pure spite.

If so, then there would be the secondary question of whether House Democrats would also vote to remove McCarthy. House Democrats are a tight well-led group, so whatever their leadership decides is the best strategic move, that’s what they’ll do. They can help oust McCarthy and make the play for a “compromise” Speaker that I’ve laid out above. Or they can save McCarthy – at which point he’d become somewhat beholden to House Democrats for the rest of the term. It would be one of those things where if you trust the House Democratic leadership in general, then you have to trust them to make the smart move on this matter.

In any case, it’s still far from clear whether Gaetz and his pals will indeed force a vote to oust McCarthy. This comes even as McCarthy’s House Republican allies are leaking to the media that they’re going to expel Gaetz if and when the House Ethics Committee (which they control) issues an ugly report about him. It’s possible that both factions could simply back down from their threats and go back to the status quo.

These are remarkable times. The kicker is that if Gaetz does manage to remove McCarthy as Speaker, it’s almost a given that McCarthy and his allies would turn around and expel Gaetz (this would require a two-thirds vote but they’d have no trouble getting it). So Gaetz would be destroying himself by moving to oust McCarthy. But Gaetz’ behavior has been consistently self destructive for awhile now. It’s possible that Gaetz thinks he’s finished anyway, and simply wants to cause trouble for people like McCarthy on his way down. Stay tuned. It’ll be an interesting week.