McCarthy’s removal as US speaker looks like a win for Putin

Yesterday’s coup against the Republican Speaker of the US House of Representatives will please the Kremlin and cause anxiety in Ukraine. Matt Gaetz, an ardent Trump supporter investigated in the past for alleged sex trafficking, brought down Speaker Kevin McCarthy by invoking a rule to which McCarthy agreed as a condition of taking office – a rule that allows a single member to demand a vote to “vacate” the Speaker’s chair.

Seven fellow Republicans joined Gaetz and all 208 House Democrats, sealing McCarthy’s fate as the first Speaker to be ousted by his own party after the third-shortest speakership in US history.

The rebellion was prompted in part by McCarthy’s deal with Democrats on Sunday to avert a federal government shutdown. The compromise suspends US military aid funding for Ukraine and lasts only 45 days, at which point a resumption of weapons shipments to Kyiv would require a sharp move towards the centre by Republicans being pulled to the right.

Gaetz is a maverick alt-right firebrand who continues to promote bogus claims that the 2020 US election was stolen and was investigated for two years for allegedly paying for women to travel across state lines to have sex. He denies wrongdoing and no charges were filed, but he’s still the subject of a congressional ethics investigation. 

McCarthy has been made to seem moderate by comparison in the final weeks of a deeply personal confrontation with Gaetz, but he tacked consistently to the right to secure the speakership in a marathon series of 15 votes in January. He opposed the creation of a January 6th commission to investigate the 2021 insurrection and has backed the launch of impeachment proceedings against President Biden even though Republicans have failed to present any evidence of corruption in Biden’s dealings with his son. 

There was a chance last week that Democrats would side with McCarthy to save his job and isolate the Republicans’ Maga fringe, but McCarthy appears to have torpedoed that by blaming the Democrats for bringing the US close to yet another government shutdown. Another deal will be needed by 17 November to keep the government open – but first Republicans have to find a new speaker who can reconcile the rebels’ America First demands with what passes nowadays for mainstream American conservatism. It’s not obvious that anyone is up to the job.

What happens next?

• Patrick McHenry, a McCarthy ally from North Carolina, is speaker pro-tem, tasked only with supervising the vote for a permanent successor.
• Candidates have been told to be ready to make their pitches next Tuesday for a vote on Wednesday. 
• Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the House majority leader, put his name forward early and is considered a frontrunner. He survived a mass shooting at a congressional baseball game in 2017, says he’s in good health even though he’s being treated for blood cancer, and has trodden a careful line on January 6th – condemning the insurrection as terrorism but voting that day to de-certify Biden’s wins in Pennsylvania and Arizona.

Getting the job will be easier than keeping it: there are “a lot of really qualified individuals” in the Republican caucus, Matt Rosendale of Montana, one of the rebels, tells the WSJ – an indication that Gaetz and company won’t necessarily hold the voting process to ransom as they did to in January. But once in post the next speaker will be subject to the same hair-trigger threat of removal as McCarthy was, and thus at the mercy of the rebels unless he or she reaches an (unlikely) accommodation with the Democrats. 

Gaetz said after Tuesday’s vote it was time for someone “new, more conservative, more trustworthy”, by which he means more precisely in the Trumpian mould. 

But it is not just the rebels who now have a chance to send shockwaves round the world. More than half the House Republicans now oppose including military aid to Ukraine in the next defence appropriations bill. It will be hard for the next speaker to ignore them.