It is a first in the history of the US Congress: the Republican leader of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, was ousted from his post on Tuesday, the victim of fratricidal quarrels within his party.
After a tense debate between conservatives in the hemicycle, 216 elected members voted to remove him, including eight Republicans, against 210.
Immediately after this unprecedented result, a nonetheless smiling Kevin McCarthy was surrounded by members of his party, who gave him a hug and shook his hand.
The vote opens a period of great turbulence in the lower house, where a replacement has to be chosen, something that promises to be very complicated. It came after a far right legislator, Matt Gaetz, tabled a motion to impeach the Speaker, even though he is a member of his party.
The Florida representative blames McCarthy mainly for negotiating a provisional budget to fund the federal administration with Democratic legislators, which was opposed by many conservatives. He also accuses McCarthy of reaching a “secret deal” with President Joe Biden on a possible package for Ukraine.
The right wing of the Republican Party is strongly opposed to the release of additional funds for Kyiv, believing that the money should instead be used to combat the migratory crisis on the border between the United States and Mexico.
Although the vast majority of McCarthy’s parliamentary group publicly supported him, the Trumpists had a de facto veto in the House given the very slim Republican majority there.
Mr McCarthy had seemed for a while to think that he would save his neck, hoping that political calculations would prevail and that he would be able to extract support from the Democrats in exchange for concessions.
That, however, did not happen. “It is up to the Republican Party to end the Republican civil war in the House,” the leader of the Democratic caucus, Hakeem Jeffries, said in a letter after a long meeting on Tuesday with his group.
"There is reason after reason to just let Republicans deal with their own problems," progressive elected representative Pramila Jayapal had said. "Let them wallow in their pigsty of incompetence and inability to govern."
In a sign of the disagreements that are tearing Republicans apart, one conservative representative followed another in the hemicycle to plead for and against Kevin McCarthy.
These internal struggles displayed in broad daylight caused former Republican president Donald Trump to react. In a message on his Truth Social platform, he wondered why Republicans continued to fight among themselves instead of fighting "the Radical Left Democrats who are destroying our country?”
An impeachment vote against a Congressional leader has not been held for over a century in the United States, and no Speaker has ever been ousted from office.
Could Kevin McCarthy, 58, try to return to his post? That hypothesis is not far-fetched, as he is entitled to stand again. However, he would do so at his peril: he was already elected by forceps in January, due to the very slim Republican majority in the House.
To gain the perch, he had had to make huge concessions with around twenty Trumpists, including accepting that any elected official would have the power to call a vote to impeach him.
That promise came back to haunt him on Tuesday.
