‘I’m Done Owning Kevin McCarthy!’ Matt Gaetz Sets Off GOP Battle Royale By Announcing He’ll Move to Vacate House Speaker

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) declared his intent to follow through on his threatened rebellion against Kevin McCarthy, saying he will file a motion this week to vacate the House Speaker.

Gaetz went on a Sunday media tour a day after Congress barely managed to avoid a government shutdown. The congressman’s revolt against McCarthy has been a prominent recurring theme in recent days — as he has tried to coerce the speaker into obeying the demands of the House’s far-right wing. In his sitdown with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Gaetz promised an imminent motion to vacate.

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. The one thing everybody has in common is no one trusts McCarthy. He lied to Biden, he lied to House conservators. He had appropriators marking to another number altogether. And the reason we were backed up against this shutdown politics is not a bug of system, it’s a feature. Kevin McCarthy’s goal was to make multiple contradictory problems, delay everything, back us up against shutdown politics, and at the end of the day, blow past the spending guardrails he’d agreed to.

Tapper noted Gaetz would need Democrat votes for a viable attempt to remove McCarthy, so he pressed the Florida representative on how many votes he thinks he has from both parties. Gaetz claimed he had enough Republican votes behind him that “When you host this show next week, if Kevin McCarthy is still the Speaker of the House, he will be serving at the pleasure of the Democrats. He will be working for 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, even as he predicted that “probably will” happen. Tapper continued to make the point, though, that “If you succeed in vacating him, you also will have to make a deal with the Democrats. You also will have to get Democratic votes to kick him out.”

“Absolutely, I will make no deal with Democrats and concede no terms to them,” Gaetz responded. “I actually think that Democrats should vote against Speaker McCarthy for free.”

I’m done owning Kevin McCarthy! We made a deal at the end of January to allow him to assume the speakership, and I’m not owning him anymore because he doesn’t tell the truth. If Democrats want to own Kevin McCarthy by bailing him out, I can’t stop them, but then he’ll be their speaker, not mine.

Watch above via CNN.