Kevin McCarthy

Kevin McCarthy spent nearly a decade positioning himself to become House Speaker. He had been the House majority Whip, then Majority Leader, then Minority Leader. He ran for Speaker in 2015 after John Boehner's resignation but withdrew before the vote, apparently concluding he lacked the votes. He waited. He built relationships. He became the most prominent Republican in the House during the Trump years, managing the difficult task of remaining close to Trump while representing a competitive California district that would ultimately flip Democratic, forcing him to relocate his political base.

In January 2023, McCarthy finally won the speakership — but only after fifteen rounds of voting and a series of concessions to the House Freedom Caucus that would prove fateful. Among those concessions was reinstating the rule allowing a single member to file a motion to vacate the chair, a procedural weapon that had been restricted since the Tea Party era. McCarthy agreed to the change believing it would never actually be used. Matt Gaetz used it nine months later.

The proximate cause of the October 2023 vote was McCarthy's decision to pass a short-term continuing resolution with Democratic support to avoid a government shutdown. The Freedom Caucus had been pushing for deeper spending cuts and was furious that McCarthy had again worked around them to govern. But the deeper problem was structural: McCarthy had won the speakership by promising things to both the Republican center and the hard right that were fundamentally incompatible. He could not satisfy both simultaneously, and every governing decision generated enemies on one flank or the other.

On October 3, 2023, Matt Gaetz stood up and called the motion to vacate. This had happened before in American history — in 1910, insurgent Republicans stripped Speaker Joe Cannon of his committee appointment powers — but no Speaker had ever actually been removed mid-term by a floor vote. McCarthy lost 210-216. Eight Republicans voted with all Democrats to remove him.

Democrats, who held the balance of power, declined to save McCarthy. Some argued they had no obligation to rescue a Republican Speaker who had repeatedly caved to the hard right and launched a politically motivated impeachment inquiry against Biden. Others pointed to McCarthy's broken promise to give Democrats advance notice of the short-term funding bill. McCarthy later suggested that Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries had privately indicated Democrats might help him survive, then pulled back. Jeffries denied this characterization.

What followed was weeks of chaos. The House was effectively paralyzed for three weeks while Republicans cycled through potential Speaker candidates. Jim Jordan lost three floor votes. Steve Scalise briefly ran and withdrew. Mike Johnson, a relatively unknown Louisiana Republican, ultimately emerged as the consensus candidate and was elected Speaker on October 25.

McCarthy resigned from Congress on December 31, 2023 — a decision that shocked many colleagues, as he had just won re-election a year earlier. He cited frustration with the institution and the impossibility of doing the job under the constraints he had accepted to win the speakership.