by WorldTribune Staff, October 4, 2023
[The following are excerpts from North Carolina Republican Rep. Jeff Jackson’s account of what transpired in the House of Representatives on Tuesday. Jackson’s account was posted to Substack.com on Wednesday.]For the first time ever in American history, the Speaker of the House has been fired.
Here’s what I saw in the room.
When I walked through the doors of the House chamber and onto the floor for the vote, the first thing I noticed was about 200 reporters up in the gallery. That’s not normal. It’s usually four or five.
Then the presiding member banged the gavel and called us into session. Everybody sat down and things got really quiet. The last time I saw everyone quietly seated was during the Speaker election in January.
In short, after just a few minutes it was clear that we all felt the weight of history with this moment. No matter how long any of these people have been in Congress, none of them had ever seen this happen before. It’s been over a hundred years since anyone has even tried to fire the Speaker.
To top it off, we didn’t know which way the vote was going to go. We almost always know what to expect on the House floor – there are very few real surprises – but this was the biggest vote of the year and we figured it was 50/50.
However, there was a small, early clue as to what would happen.
The whole effort to fire the Speaker was led by the right-flank. They’ve been upset with the Speaker for months, but what really set them off was last week when the Speaker went around them and relied on the minority party for the votes to keep the government from shutting down. They were furious about that.
We figured if the Speaker lost three members of his party, he’d probably survive, but if he lost six or seven, he was probably toast.
And when I looked around the chamber, I saw six members of the right-flank, sitting together, all in a row, and away from the rest of their party.
We hadn’t even begun the debate yet, but seeing those six people sitting together like that told me that he was probably toast.
The Speaker knew he was going to lose those folks, but he was hoping to peel off a few votes from the minority party.
Some folks in the minority were expecting him to reach out and say, “Hey, let’s make a deal. I’ll offer you this, and I want your vote.”
But instead, he went on TV the day before and basically said, “Here is my offer to the other party: Nothing.”
The minority party heard that from him and said, “Well, ok then, best of luck.”
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For those of you who very much wanted to see this chaotic moment become some kind of bipartisan success, that was the core challenge. There was no way for McCarthy to reach any kind of agreement with the minority party that wouldn’t blow up his remaining support within his party. Even if the agreement had been relatively small (i.e., let some bipartisan bill come to a vote), the result would have been major political fallout for McCarthy within his party. My sense is that if he had felt it were at all possible for him to stay in power by working with the minority party, he absolutely would have done it – he just knew it wasn’t.
Before the vote, there was about an hour of debate. It was unlike anything I’ve ever seen. The only people who spoke were members of the majority party. It alternated between allies of McCarthy and his right-flank ousters. It was basically one party having an internal fight in the most public way possible. They went back and forth yelling into the microphones about how angry they were with each other.
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Then we voted, and when they announced that he had lost, there was no cheering, no booing.
Everyone just sat there in silence for a moment. This had never happened before — ever.
Then a congressman from North Carolina (not me!) walked to the podium and told us that he was now the Acting Speaker.
Which was a surprise to us. As it turns out, under the rules, the Speaker is allowed to secretly pick someone to be the acting Speaker if anything happens to them, and he had picked this person.
So this person stood up and basically said that we would be in recess until further notice.
Then he brought down the gavel as hard as he possibly could. He just smashed the heck out of it, because he’s good friends with the Speaker and he was really upset.
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