Why House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is in trouble despite US avoiding shutdown

The United States has avoided a shutdown after its Congress passed a stopgap funding bill – known as a continuing resolution or CR – that keeps the lights on for another 45 days. While this comes as a relief to many including government workers and those who rely on essential services, one man is now in the hot seat – House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. But what happened exactly? Why is McCarthy in trouble? And is his job really in danger? Let’s take a closer look: What happened? The House on Saturday voted 335-91 to fund the government through 17 November. The Continuing Resolution passed by the House came after McCarthy did an abrupt U-turn on his party hardliners’ demand that any bill be passed in the House with only Republican votes.

In the end, more Democrats than Republicans voted for the CR.

As Sky News’ James Matthews explained, “Kevin McCarthy has not been able to take anything forward with the support of the Republicans alone, so at the last minute he has said ‘OK I’m going to rely on Democrat support to push things forward.’” The Democratic-majority Senate then voted 88-9 to pass the measure to avoid the federal government’s fourth partial shutdown in a decade. The bill was sent to President Joe Biden, who signed it into law before the 12:01 am deadline. That move marked a profound shift from earlier in the week, when a shutdown looked all but inevitable. A shutdown would mean that most of the government’s 4 million employees would not get paid, whether they were working or not, and also would shutter a range of federal services, from National Parks to financial regulators. Federal agencies had already drawn up detailed plans that spell out what services would continue, such as airport screening and border patrols, and what must shut down, including scientific research and nutrition aid to 7 million poor mothers. “The American people can breathe a sigh of relief: there will be no government shutdown tonight,” Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said after the vote. “Democrats have said from the start that the only solution for avoiding a shutdown is bipartisanship, and we are glad Speaker McCarthy has finally heeded our message.” Why is McCarthy in trouble? Because certain far-right members of the House GOP have been threatening to oust McCarthy if they did not get what they want in the bill including deep spending cuts for the government and no money for Ukraine. McCarthy is already a weak Speaker. He endured a brutal 15 rounds of voting in January before being elected to his much-coveted position — during which he had to make multiple concessions that increased the power of Republican hardliners. One was the decision to allow just one member to put forward a motion to vacate the Speaker’s chair.

In essence, this meant that hardliners could threaten McCarthy’s speakership at any moment.

Shortly after the House passed a bill late on Saturday averting a partial government shutdown, hardline Republican conservatives began targeting McCarthy’s role as speaker, saying he had scored a victory for the “Uniparty” of Washington. “Should he remain Speaker of the House?” Republican Representative Andy Biggs, a leading hardliner, asked on the social platform X, formerly known as Twitter. [caption id=“attachment_11945332” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Representative Matt Gaetz has vowed to oust House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. AP[/caption] “Kevin McCarthy put a CR on the Floor that got 209 Democrat votes, since it kept in place the Biden-Pelosi-Schumer policies that are destroying the country and the spending levels that are bankrupting us,” hardline Representative Bob Good said on X. On Sunday, GOP representative Matt Gaetz on Sunday declared he would seek to remove McCarthy as Speaker. Gaetz had threatened to file his ouster motion if McCarthy worked with Democrats and he said the spending package blew past spending guardrails that McCarthy had agreed to previously. “I do intend to file a motion to vacate against Speaker McCarthy this week. I think we need to rip off the Band-Aid. I think we need to move on with new leadership that can be trustworthy,” Gaetz told CNN. “Look, the one thing everybody has in common is that nobody trusts Kevin McCarthy,” he added. “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.” “If at this time next week Kevin McCarthy is still speaker of the House, it will be because Democrats bailed him out,” Gaetz said in an interview on ABC. “I am relentless, and I will continue to pursue this objective.” McCarthy has the support of a large majority of House Republicans, but because the GOP holds such a slim 221-212 majority, he may need votes from some Democrats to keep his job. When asked how many Republicans he had on board, Gaetz said he had enough to ensure that if McCarthy retains the speakership he would “be serving at the pleasure of the Democrats.” “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. McCarthy decided to bring a vote on a measure that could win Democratic support, knowing full well that it could jeopardize his job. One of his advisers told Reuters the speaker believed some hardliners would try to oust him under any circumstances. Is his job really in danger? No Speaker has ever been removed from office through such a move. Procedural votes could be offered to halt the motion or it could trigger a House floor vote on whether McCarthy should remain speaker. McCarthy doesn’t seem to think he’s in peril. The Speaker, in the immediate aftermath of the vote, dismissed concerns that hardline Republicans could try to oust him as leader. “I want to be the adult in the room, go ahead and try,” McCarthy told reporters after the passage of the bill. “And you know what? If I have to risk my job for standing up for the American public, I will do that.” He said that House Republicans would push ahead with plans to pass more funding bills that would cut spending and include other conservative priorities, such as tighter border controls. On Sunday, McCarthy reiterated his ‘what, me worry?’ stance. “That’s nothing new,” McCarthy said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

A defiant House Speaker told his critics to ‘bring it on’.

“I’ll survive,” he continued. “You know this is personal with Matt. Matt voted against the most conservative ability to protect our border, secure our border. He’s more interested in securing TV interviews than doing something.” “So be it — bring it on. Let’s get over with it and let’s start governing,” McCarthy added. Gaetz’s tactics have generated considerable scorn from many House Republicans. Representative Mike Lawler of New York spoke of Gaetz’s “diatribe of delusional thinking” and said Gaetz was acting for “personal, political reasons.” A piece in CNN stated that the GOP hardliners have an extremely hard choice to make regarding McCarthy. “Currently, there is no standout candidate to replace McCarthy who is guaranteed to be any more successful in advancing far-right goals through a divided Washington,” the piece noted. The piece argued it is possible that McCarthy, assisted by the Democrats, survives this challenge to his Speakership. “Yet the lesson of the Trump era of Republicanism is that uproar and disruption are never done. They just keep on getting more extreme,” the piece concluded. ‘House Republicans failed’ The standoff comes just months after Congress brought the federal government to the brink of defaulting on its $31.4 trillion debt. The drama has raised worries on Wall Street, where the Moody’s ratings agency has warned it could damage US creditworthiness. Congress typically passes stopgap spending bills to buy more time to negotiate the detailed legislation that sets funding for federal programs. [caption id=“attachment_13164982” align=“alignnone” width=“300”] President Joe Biden declined to weigh in when asked if Democrats should help Kevin McCarthy keep his job. AP[/caption] This year, a group of Republicans has blocked action in the House as they have pressed to tighten immigration and cut spending below levels agreed to in the debt-ceiling standoff in the spring. The McCarthy-Biden deal that avoided default set a limit of $1.59 trillion in discretionary spending in fiscal 2024. House Republicans are demanding a further $120 billion in cuts. The funding fight focuses on a relatively small slice of the $6.4 trillion U.S. budget for this fiscal year. Lawmakers are not considering cuts to popular benefit programs such as Social Security and Medicare. “We should never have been in this position in the first place. Just a few months ago, Speaker McCarthy and I reached a budget agreement to avoid precisely this type of manufactured crisis,” Biden said in a statement after the vote. “House Republicans tried to walk away from that deal by demanding drastic cuts that would have been devastating for millions of Americans. They failed.” Biden also declined to weigh in when asked if Democrats should help McCarthy keep his job. “I don’t have a vote on that matter,” Biden said at the White House on Sunday. “I’ll leave that to the leadership in the House and the Senate.” With inputs from agencies