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Oct. 5, 2023 - Doug Collins Podcast
30:49
Thunderstruck: Kevin McCarthy removed as Speaker of the House
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You want to listen to a podcast?
By who?
Georgia GOP Congressman Doug Collins.
How is it?
The greatest thing I have ever heard in my whole life.
I could not believe my ears.
In this house, wherever the rules are disregarded, chaos and mob rule.
It has been said today, where is bravery?
I'll tell you where bravery is found and courage is found.
It's found in this minority who has lived through the last year of nothing but rules being broken, people being put down, questions not being answered, and this majority say, be damned with anything else.
We're going to impeach and do whatever we want to do.
Why?
Because we won an election.
I guarantee you, one day you'll be back in the minority and it ain't gonna be that fun.
Hey everybody, welcome to the podcast today.
Today's special episode, breaking news yesterday.
I mean, you could hear thunderstruck being played in the background yesterday at the Capitol.
The improbable happened.
Kevin McCarthy was removed as speaker yesterday after a group of eight Republicans voted with the Democrats to remove him as speaker and has now led to the state we're currently in.
So today on the podcast, I want to give you a little bit of quick history.
I want to give you a little insight on why Patrick McHenry is now the Speaker Pro Tem, who's in charge until a new speaker is named or voted on by the House.
Also, I'm going to go into the ins and outs of how this got here and what lies ahead.
So just after the break, we're going to dive into it.
Glad you're here.
Big news for the day.
I want you to have all the information be caught up to date.
We'll see you right after the break.
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Okay, we're back.
Let's just break this down.
Most of you may be waking up today here on Wednesday, you're getting your podcast, and you saw some of the headlines from yesterday with Kevin McCarthy being ousted as Speaker of the House, and how that all came about.
Let's go backwards a little bit.
The interesting thing about this is it is the first time a speaker has actually been ousted by a motion to vacate the chair, which means basically a parliamentary procedure that says that a member can bring a motion to declare that the speaker's chair is vacant.
In other words, they...
Don't like the Speaker.
They think that there's not enough votes to keep them in the Speaker's chair, meaning that they don't have the majority of the Congress, the House, to do so.
And if they don't, then they are removed immediately from Speakership.
This is exactly what happened.
Now, it has been threatened a lot.
I'm going to get into that here in just a few minutes in the last few years.
This goes back...
As long as the house basically has been in order, it was used about 100 years ago to a failure to remove a speaker, Joseph Cannon, in which Cannon Office Building actually is named for.
They tried it with him, and it was not successful.
The interesting thing about that was if you go back in history a little bit and look at this, this is a time when there was a big conflict, if you would, between the speaker's office and the committee chairs and who was actually running stuff.
And if you look at it today, some of that's really not changed.
The speaker in the House of Representatives, just as the speaker is in a lot of state houses, is a very powerful position.
They control committee assignments, they control office space, they can control security, they control when the bills are up, when bills are not up.
I mean, it is a very powerful position, which means that a lot of times you have to make decisions that's going to alienate some in your own conference because they didn't get what they wanted.
And maybe they supported you if you were the speaker and they expected something in return.
Well, sometimes that just doesn't happen.
So in looking at The issue here with Kevin McCarthy and looking at the discussion of what happened, let's just take this into account.
Historically, what we've got to understand is this has not been something that has been used a great deal, but when it is used as it was yesterday, it will throw everything into chaos.
Matt Gaetz, Brought the motion.
It has two days to where it had to be acted upon by the House.
Kevin McCarthy and his leadership team chose yesterday afternoon to do that.
They first tried to table the motion.
That failed.
Once the tabling failed, Fell and it was not being tabled and they were actually going to vote on it.
Most people at that point realized that Kevin McCarthy's speakership was in serious, serious trouble.
There were already seven people who had already said they were going to vote against him, which was more than enough to do so in a slight majority that the Republicans held.
Even with absences on the Democrat side and Republican side, it still...
It was enough to carry it over.
The only question was, would they actually stand up and vote in a roll call fashion to vote against him?
They did.
So again, this has become a problem mainly for Republicans.
Because the Democrats changed the rules on motion to vacate the chair after they had watched what had happened to Republicans for the eight years prior.
They changed it to a higher number to actually remove a speaker from the chair, which in essence took that off the table.
So there was no ever talk of removing Nancy Pelosi as chair as the speaker from when the Democrats were in control, because frankly, there's no way they would have got the votes because it would be required You know, a lot more to do it.
In the House, with the Republicans in charge, they went back to the one person can bring the motion, and that's what happened.
This all goes back to the January when Kevin McCarthy took 15 rounds of balloting for Kevin to become Speaker.
And a lot of what happened over yesterday was grounded in what was supposedly transpired.
Now, if you hear McCarthy and his allies speak, he has done everything he can to Live up to the agreement that was made in January.
If you listen to Matt Gaetz and others, he did not.
And again, I think part of this was baked in.
Just an honest opinion here, there was no way this day was not coming.
There just wasn't.
Many of the ones who wanted everything that they had been promised, it was just going to run up into the realities of the House, realities of people who could vote for bills, not vote for bills, that were really out of Kevin McCarthy's hands.
And There were some things, though, however, that McCarthy did with moving stuff forward, such as the debt ceiling, such as the continuing resolution of his past weekend, other things that infuriated or just exacerbated the problem that he had with Matt Gaetz and others.
Now, there's a lot of discussion about this being personal with Matt Gaetz and And Kevin McCarthy, again, history will just have to let that be decided on the ethics charges.
The Speaker does not get briefed on the ethics charges.
The Speaker does not sit on the ethics committee.
Matt, as Gates has said, his signal to the committee that they need to move it forward, especially when him and Gates, McCarthy and Gates, were always a struggle.
It seemed to always pop up.
That was Matt's contention.
Bottom line, it came up.
I want to lay in a little bit of groundwork here for you that you need to understand about this.
I've said before, this has not been an issue in Congress for the most part up until the last 12 years.
When the Republicans, 13 years, took over in 2011, after the 2010 election, The three speakers of the House of Republicans have all been either forced out or voted out.
So John Boehner, Paul Ryan, Kevin McCarthy.
So every speaker has lasted.
Boehner, of course, lasted the longest.
Ryan, the next longest, and McCarthy, of course, the shortest.
But this has been a problem ever since, because every time somebody or a group in the House doesn't like what a speaker is doing, they raise the specter of making a motion to vacate the chair.
Now, up until now, there's been enough Republicans in the House to where they could never get enough to make it happen, because the margins were 20 members, 30 members.
They could get 15 to 20 members, but they never could get enough to actually put it over.
Boehner just got tired of fighting it.
And the reality is he just was tired of what he viewed as unrealistic demands.
He wrote a book about it.
You can go read it.
The unrealistic demands, which he just didn't want to do anymore.
That turned it over in which we had a vacancy for Speaker.
McCarthy tried to become Speaker then, could not become Speaker then, didn't have the votes.
Paul Ryan was the choice for Speaker.
And Paul basically ran into the same issues that Boehner had ran into.
Then we went into the minority.
The minority Democrats changed the rules because of what they had seen just the past eight years in dealing with the Republicans in their conference, watching the motion to be vacate, the chair be used as a punishment tool for people who didn't get what they wanted and making a point.
And so they changed the rules.
When the Republicans got back and McCarthy had to negotiate his speakership, this was one of the rules that came back.
This is a sad position for Republicans to be in because what it says is, is that we have a group of members who would rather sacrifice the speaker than deal with some of the internal issues that were going on.
Some of what were being, uh, hampered.
So the history here, the complaint that is going on goes back to McCarthy being elected speaker and the, uh, Things that were, quote, agreed to.
Now, again, if you're listening to Kevin McCarthy, you listen to the allies, and many of them even conservatives, such as Thomas Massage, Jeff Roy, Jim Jordan, and of course others in the House say that they've lived up to it.
They've done the best that they could.
But for Matt Gaetz and others, it was not enough.
And remember, many of these did not vote for Kevin McCarthy in the first time.
They voted president and allowed it to happen.
Let me take a couple of things that are...
First off, before we get into their action complaints, some of you have asked and I've gotten calls about how was Patrick McHenry named the Speaker Pro Tem?
Because right after the vote, Steve Womack, who was in the chair, called it over.
It was turned over.
The clerk read that Patrick McHenry would become the Speaker Pro Tem with all the powers vested in the Speaker to elect, you know, to preside over the election of a new Speaker.
Now, how did that happen?
It was because after 2001, there needed a line of secession that could be easily administered in case of an attack because a lot of people forget that the Speaker of the House is third in line to the presidency.
So in other words, if something simultaneously happened to the President and Vice President, the Speaker of the House would actually become President of the United States.
So this was put into order after September 11, 2001. Kevin McCarthy, after being elected Speaker, had to submit a letter to the Clerk of the House dictating who his choice would be to succeed him if he became incapacitated or Uh, was removed as was yesterday to then get the house to a point of electing a new speaker.
So there's a letter, many of you I'm sure did not know this, but there was a letter has been sitting there under all speakers since 2001 that named someone that would be taking over for them if the speaker becomes incapacitated or voted out of their position.
So that's how Patrick McHenry from North Carolina, chairman of the financial service committee is now the, uh, de facto speaker of the house.
He has now said that they're going to take a week till this time next week to run for the folks who want to run for speaker, run for speaker, have the candidate forums, and then they'll start voting next week to form a speakership.
Now, the question will be is can they get somebody who has 218 votes on the floor?
You can elect a speaker In the conference with a majority.
So if they have 220 votes, they have 110, you get 111, you're the speaker from conference.
But the question will be, can that translate over into 218 votes on the floor, realizing that no Democrat will vote for Republican?
So, this is going to be hard.
There's no path currently for anyone, if you do a whip count, which means you go and count noses, so to speak, on who's going to vote for who.
There's no clear path to 218. And when you look at that, that presents a problem.
This is the problem that McCarthy had going into January.
It's now going to become a bigger problem.
And also, in the sense that there's no consensus candidate.
When you look at this...
Consensus, I mean, you've already had Donald Trump's name being mentioned, which, by the way, for those of you who are interested, the speaker does not have to be a member of the House.
They can be someone out on this nowhere connected to the government and can be named House if they can get 218 votes.
That is such a rarity.
It will never, ever happen.
But you have to also say there was nobody ever thought the motion to vacate would actually remove a speaker.
And guess what?
It did.
So that's a problem.
Right now, some of those members are supporting Donald Trump.
Donald Trump does not have 218 to get speakership in the House with the Republicans.
So, again, that one is wishful thinking, not going to happen.
Would it be interesting to see?
Oh, yeah, it'd be interesting to see.
Just, again, let's just be honest about the assessment here.
It's not going to happen.
Then it leads you to others, such as Steve Scleese, Jim Jordan, You've got Elise Stefanik, you've got Patrick McHenry who's there, others.
So again, the question becomes is how do they find 218?
This could not be, this may not be a quick path.
As long as there is no speaker, there is then McHenry will stay as Speaker Pro Tem and the house is shut down.
This is the other issue.
Let's just say they get to next week and they can't find a path to 218. So Gates and the other crew who voted with him and others, I think it'll become a little more dicey.
But let's just say they have five members who will not vote for the Speaker.
Then they have to go back to sort of what they did with McCarthy and who will vote present, who will vote not present, you know, to get the number lower without giving the number to the Democrats.
This is a high possibility because there is a lot of...
This is the ultimate...
Class officer vote.
Remember back in high school or college when you voted for your fraternity or sorority presidents and officers or you voted in high school for a student council president and everything?
This is it on steroids.
I mean, it's person against person.
It's who can get what.
It's who's closer to who.
It's, hey, will you promise me this?
And in a conference election like this, there'll be many times somebody will say, oh, I'm going to vote for you.
And then they vote for somebody else.
I mean, this is just the way it works.
So this is going to be ugly.
You will not see it.
It will be behind closed doors.
And then eventually they will bring out their nominee.
And hopefully they will have a nominee that can get 218 on the floor when they walk to the floor and not be still searching for votes when they get there.
Now, until that happens, everything in the House is shut down.
So, for those of you out there wondering, you know, if you're working in the federal government or you're working or you're looking at the spending, the CR that was just passed, 45 days to the middle of November, you're now burning time on that CR in which nothing really is being done.
No formal committee votes can be held.
No formal votes on the floor can be held.
So, border issues, funding issues, spending issues, all of that shut down in the House right now.
None of it will take place.
There's no delay here on getting anything done until you actually get a speaker.
And then, of course, then you could have the speaker make some changes.
The new speaker make changes in committee chairs or want to make changes in committee chairs, going to the steering committee and asking for changes.
So a lot is still up in the air at this point with whoever this new speaker would be.
But you do have to understand, for those who are clamoring, saying, oh, we need to get rid of McCarthy, we need to get rid of McCarthy.
That happened, and now you've got to deal with the fallout and the consequences of that, meaning that the House is not functioning.
The House is leaning more toward a bad spending bill than they were because of time and the aversion to shutdowns and everything that a lot of members feel, and also a lot of members who are in vulnerable districts, Republicans, are not going to want to be part of what is viewed as chaos.
So, This is a tenuous time for the conference.
They're going to have to come together and figure this out.
The likelihood of that right now, though, is not good.
And so it's going to take a lot before next Wednesday.
I hope that they will get in the room and figure out that it takes 218 to govern.
There seems to be a disconnect in governing here.
Now, that's where I want to get to last.
The demands that were brought, and I'm going to hit just a couple of...
that said McCarthy broke his word.
Now, the 12 spending bills, if you've heard me say on this podcast, I am definitely a proponent of bringing each of the spending bills to the floor and have them voted up or down, amended and then sent to the Senate.
It is sort of funny to me, though, that some of these, all of these 12 have multiple things put into them.
They may be largely grouped together, but they have different departments and different things going on.
So those who say we need single-subject bills, well, there's no way that an appropriations bill could be deemed a single-subject bill, except in the most broad definition.
The problem was, though, is that Gates and others who voted against McCarthy being speaker also have been voting against rules and voting against bills as they were trying to bring these individual 12 bills up.
This is the frustrating part if you're Kevin McCarthy this morning.
In July, they brought up the military construction and VA bill.
Okay, and right there is two, again, if you call that a single subject bill, not sure how you do it, military construction and VA into one spending bill.
They passed that one.
Then Ag Approach, which spans all your agricultural policy plus all of your food stamp programs and a lot of your welfare programs and others, all in this bill.
They couldn't get it to the floor because they didn't have the votes to pass the rule.
So it's interesting to me that because of numbers and because of, you know, many people picked and choose what they wanted to vote on here.
They wanted 12 appropriations bills brought to the floor, but yet they wouldn't vote for them when they were coming up, either through the rules or the actual bill.
Now, a couple weeks ago, they voted defense out and another bill out.
But again, ag approach was left off.
Again, Agaprobes is not the hardest bill that they have appropriation-wise because of policies.
You got labor age, labor and health, which is your Labor Department of Health and Human Services, which deal with everything from the NIH to the CDC to all the stuff that has the COVID baggage.
That one is hard, and also abortion, a lot of other things have already been built in there.
Those are almost impossible to pass in a Republican Congress, even with a large number of, when we had large majorities, it was still never passed on its own.
So here's your problem for the next speaker, whoever they may be.
In these spending bill fights, you're going up to the end of the year, you're going to get the speakership, let's just say at best, October 15th.
Let's say mid-month.
You've got one month then to deal with a CR deadline.
You do not have enough time at this point to put all the bills, it seems like, on the floor.
Even if you did, you have to have 218 people in the House to vote for them.
Republicans, because the Democrats, with all the stuff that has been put on them and the decision by Kevin McCarthy to go at a lower number instead of the number agreed to on the debt ceiling, they're not going to vote for it.
So it's got to be Republican only.
I've said this before.
Whether it's Democrat or Republican in the majority, it doesn't matter.
If you can't move a bill in the House, it's because of the majority, never because of the minority.
The majority has the majority for a reason.
It means they've got enough votes to go over the threshold of 218. And if they can't pass something, it is their fault.
It means that Republicans can't get in a room and find 218 people to agree on something.
That means that Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordan, Don Bacon, Tom Cole, the various different entities of that group can't come together and find 218. And this is what has been the problem.
What we've seen, though, recently is you have 10 to 15 who don't want to move things, and you have the vast majority of the conference wanting to move it.
The new speaker is going to have to deal with that.
The new speaker is going to have to say, I'm going to give in to the demands and give just the smaller group everything they want at the risk of, and at some point in time, the other end of the spectrum, moderate Republicans or Republicans who are in Biden 1 districts, are going to have to decide, okay, I'm going to take these votes.
I don't like these votes.
They're going to hurt me in my real life, but I'm going to take them anyway, and then we'll see what comes back from the Senate.
Or they're going to say, no, we're not going to do this.
If they can stop bills, we can too.
This is where the new speaker is going into a very unwinnable situation.
Until Republicans realize that their job in the majority is to govern and to get conservative stuff done.
You can't get it all.
Get some.
Right now we're getting none because we can't get anything passed and negotiated with the Senate.
So this is the part.
Now, some of you don't want to hear that.
Some of you say, well, just fight.
That's what we got to do.
But think about this.
Democrats do not have any incentive to give in, and they've not really given.
They'll give you a little bit.
They'll give you some when it's a divided government.
You take what you can get and do as much as you can, say, on border wall and others, to force Democrats into bad votes.
And then, if they do reject your ideas, then you can take them and beat them at the polling places to get a larger Republican majority, which, again, or flip the Senate to become Republican.
This idea that simply because you send it over and expect the Senate just to take it as is, is frankly very short-sighted and wrong.
Can you get things done?
Yes.
Does it mean you get everything you want?
No.
I go back to this many times.
The group, when they first came in in 2011, said, we're going to repeal Obamacare, repeal Obamacare, repeal Obamacare.
And they never had the vote that could pass it out of the House, but the Senate wasn't going to take it up, and the President was never going to sign it.
There's no way you could honestly look at a constituent in the face and say, hey, we're going to definitely get rid of Obamacare.
It's not a true statement.
Now, during that time, I think it was we passed over eight pieces of legislation that all cut into Obamacare or gutted its funding mechanisms.
But nobody ever heard about that because we had too many people out there saying, we're just going to defund Obamacare and do away with Obamacare, of which was never a possibility under the scenario we have.
So, again, my question to those who want to have everything is, are you okay with nothing?
And by the way, nothing means that you're going to get less than a conservative ideal.
You're going to have no leverage to negotiate, which is the key term of finding how to pass legislation.
It's called negotiating.
This is the problem that the new speaker is going to have.
So I just lay all this out here.
I didn't want to spend a long time today.
Well, of course, we'll be talking about who's up, who's down in the speaker race here in the next little bit.
But that's your overview today.
The motion to vacate share has actually been used.
A lot of people shocked by that, that it actually happened.
Eight people in the Republican Party decided the Speaker should not be continuing to be Speaker.
Well over 200 Republicans said he should be.
And, but that doesn't matter when you don't have the majority.
The prime example of what we've been talking about.
Patrick McHenry is Speaker Pro Tem running the show because of a letter sent by Kevin McCarthy right after he was elected Speaker to ensure secession in case something happens.
Happened to him, and now the new speaker elections will happen over the next week.
This will take place behind closed doors.
You will hear a lot of speculating and punditry from reporters on Capitol Hill, who's up, who's down, who's mad, who's not.
But the reality is, until they get in the room and...
See the candidates.
See who's sporting who.
See who can get votes.
Then you don't know.
But remember, in the conference, they only have to have a majority of the conference.
On the floor, they've got to have 218. That's going to be your big issue coming forward.
It doesn't matter if Jim Jordan could get 115, which is more than the majority.
The question is, will the other 105 vote for him on the floor?
There's a probability they may not.
Or Steve Scalise, the same run.
So again, this is a two-fold chess match.
One, how do you win the conference?
And then number two, how do you win on the floor?
And it involves basically the same conference, so the numbers are going to be very important going forward.
But that's where we're at.
Take this and use it to hopefully your benefit, realizing that the next Speaker of the House, for those of you who, and I'll just say this, look, there are many things that Matt Gantt said I agree with in the fundamental principles of 12 pro provisions of the bill, regular order.
Having committee work.
But I also know that that is fine and good until it actually becomes reality and you can't pass anything.
If you can't pass anything, And you're having to move a bill to, you know, basically take into account a small minority of your conference, knowing that it has a Senate to run into, not that you don't be as aggressive as you can, but knowing that it's going to come back, will you vote for it again?
Again, this is the problem that we're dealing with right now going forward.
So, again, if you're happy about today, then okay, but be very careful.
Strap in.
I'm warning you now.
This is going to be a bumpy ride.
It's not going to get a lot better.
Your best hope is to go and flip the Senate next year to get Republicans and then put a Republican in the White House.
And you still have to have 218, a la when we tried to do our healthcare bill and John McCain killed it in the Senate.
So look, this is about numbers.
I've told you this before on the podcast.
It's about numbers.
Politics is simply math played out in the real world.
So...
Yesterday, Kevin McCarthy didn't have the math.
Math kicked him out.
Now somebody else has got to find that math to become speaker, and then they've got to start the business of finding math to pass bills.
Will they do it?
Best of luck.
Are they in a tough situation?
Yes.
It's pretty amazing to me that even people would want the job in some ways, given the conditions in which it is abounded right now.
But hopefully somebody will step forward.
Hopefully somebody can then put this conference together because conservative values and conservative legislation are dying on the vine because we're not able to do anything and we're not able to move anything forward.
So what would be a 100% conservative bill?
That we could get 80% of.
We're not getting anything for it.
Which means that the democratic principles from the previous Congress are still being enforced.
Think about that one for a while.
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