Rep. Matt Gaetz said Tuesday he has no issue that it took only a handful of Republican lawmakers who did not trust Rep. Kevin McCarthy to remove him from the speakership.
“As it turns out, getting 200 Republicans to trust you isn’t enough to be a speaker,” Mr. Gaetz, Florida Republican, told The Washington Times. He had been asked how he could say that House Republicans did not trust Mr. McCarthy, when 210 GOP lawmakers voted for him to remain as speaker.
Mr. Gaetz called for what is known in Congress as a motion to “vacate the chair.”
Mr. McCarthy lost his job in a 216-210 vote, with eight Republicans joining all the Democrats in voting for the motion.
The House will be governed by a temporary speaker, Rep. Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, who was chosen from a list provided to the House clerk earlier this year by Mr. McCarthy for use in the event of an emergency.
The temporary speaker’s authority will be limited to presiding over the speaker election.
“We are not at the end of this process,” Mr. Gaetz told reporters. “At most we’re approaching halftime, we’ve got to be able to assemble a governing coalition we have to build from a place of trust. The reason Kevin McCarthy went down today is because nobody trusts Kevin McCarthy. “Kevin McCarthy has made multiple contradictory promises. And when they all came due, he lost votes of people who maybe don’t even ideologically agree with me on everything.”
Mr. McHenry is chair of the House Financial Services Committee.
The House will later conduct votes to elect a new speaker — a process that will center on Mr. McCarthy vying to win reelection to the post, according to sources close to Mr. McCarthy.
Mr. Gaetz reiterated his support for House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, Louisiana Republican, who is undergoing cancer treatment, to be speaker. He also mentioned House Majority Whip Tom Emmer of Minnesota; and Reps. Mike Johnson of Louisiana, Jody Arrington of Texas, Kevin Hearn of Oklahoma, and former Rep. Lee Zeldin, New York Republican.
