Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s ouster was complete by Tuesday night, but the squabbling among New York’s congressional delegation was only getting warmed up.
The unprecedented move is particularly notable for New York representatives. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is the presumed next speaker if Democrats regain control of the House. And during the 2022 midterms, New York was a key battleground in Republicans winning control of the House.
During an interview with WNYC’s “Morning Edition” on Wednesday, Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler referred to the entire incident as a “Republican civil war.”
“There was a lot of very ill will towards [McCarthy] by other Republicans on the floor,” Nadler said. “The Democrats – throughout the entire hour of debate – just sat there, watching, and said not a word.”
But Democrats played a crucial role in the drama.
Days earlier, the House of Representatives proposed several budget cuts that Senate Democrats were almost guaranteed to reject. The disagreement over the spending bills risked the threat of a federal shutdown. The shutdown was averted after McCarthy worked with Democrats to temporarily fund the government. In retribution, a group of House Republicans led by Rep. Matt Gaetz began the push to vote the speaker out of office. Democrats joined eight hard-right Republicans to topple McCarthy by a vote of 216 to 210.
“It’s a very sad day,” Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, a Staten Island Republican, told CBS New York on Tuesday after the historic vote. “There was no good reason to remove Speaker McCarthy. The reason why Matt Gaetz chose to go after him – in that space – is because he’s a right-wing extremist who simply went after him because of personal differences.”
The bad-mouthing began shortly after Jeffries issued a statement following McCarthy’s ouster on Tuesday. In his statement, which he posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, the minority leader described a “solemn moment” for…
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