Indianz.Com > News > Cronkite News: Republican revolt leads to ouster of Speaker of the House
Biggs, Crane join Democrats in historic vote to oust McCarthy as speaker
Friday, October 6, 2023
Cronkite News
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Arizona Reps. Andy Biggs and Eli Crane were among the eight conservative Republicans who voted with all House Democrats Tuesday to oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the first time in history a sitting speaker has been removed.
The 216-210 vote could paralyze the House – it took 15 ballots for Republicans to elect McCarthy speaker earlier this year – at a time when Congress has a little more than six weeks to pass a fiscal 2024 budget or face another potential government shutdown.
“The fact that you had a united Democratic front, uniting with the furthest right members of the Republican caucus, is something that not only makes your head spin, but wonder what the political fallout is going to be,” said Jason Rose, an Arizona-based political consultant.
“Anyone who knows precisely what the political fallout is going to be, after something happens for the first time in American history, is a captain of BS,” Rose said.
— Rep. Eli Crane (@RepEliCrane) October 3, 2023Rep. Juan Ciscomani, R-Tucson, one of the four Arizona Republicans who voted to keep McCarthy, agreed that “Washington is broken,” but said removing the speaker is not the way to fix things. “The American people deserve better than the chaos controlling Congress right now. Speaker McCarthy’s removal is pointless, unproductive and harmful to the agenda we put forth when we were elected,” Ciscomani said in a prepared statement. “A handful of Republicans partnered with Democrats to stop our efforts to get it done, obstructing the work we have at hand,” Ciscomani said. Most other Arizona lawmakers did not respond to requests for comment or declined to do so. But Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Tucson, said McCarthy “never kept his word” and it was time for him to go. “The problem Kevin had as Speaker is that no one trusted him,” Grijalva said in a statement released by his office. “Democrats will stand united in opposition to the extremist Republican agenda. This historic moment should be a turning point – we must come together to end governance by threats, and instead start governing for our communities.” That Democrats voted as a bloc to remove McCarthy was not a surprise to Mike Noble, CEO of Phoenix-based Noble Predictive Insights. “For Democrats to vote that way and, again, put the GOP in disarray, this is only to their political advantage,” Noble said. Noble said that with their slim majority in the House – Republicans hold 221 seats to Democrats’ 212 – and their recent infighting, electing a new speaker will not be an easy feat for the GOP. “You can already tell the moderates are not happy. You know the Freedom Caucus and such have their folks that they’d like” to be the next speaker, Noble said. “I think it’s going to be an interesting process, but it’s also going to create a lot of dysfunction.”
And troubles for Republicans in the House could extend beyond the selection of the next speaker and into the 2024 elections, when the GOP will be trying to hold on to its majority, said Sean Noble, political consultant for Compass Strategies. “The Republican members who voted to remove McCarthy without any plan of how to move forward makes them look like toddlers throwing a temper tantrum,” Sean Noble said, “not the adults who are supposed to govern.” For more stories from Cronkite News, visit cronkitenews.azpbs.org.I will not seek to run again for Speaker of the House. I may have lost a vote today, but I fought for what I believe in—and I believe in America. It has been an honor to serve. https://t.co/4EMpOuwtzy
— Kevin McCarthy (@SpeakerMcCarthy) October 3, 2023
Note: This story originally appeared on Cronkite News. It is published via a Creative Commons license. Cronkite News is produced by the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.
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