House Republicans tip off Matt Gaetz expulsion in wake of Speaker debacle
Over the weekend House Republicans made clear through a media leak that if Matt Gaetz pursued the removal of Kevin McCarthy as Speaker, they would retaliate by expelling Gaetz. They even spelled out the specific path they’d use: having the House Ethics Committee issue a damning report about his underage sex trafficking scandal and using that as the basis for the expulsion.
Now, sure enough, House Republicans are tipping off to Punchbowl News that they are indeed in a mood to make a motion to have Gaetz expelled. There’s no guarantee they’ll go through with it; people change their minds. But they wouldn’t be feeding something like this to the media if they weren’t at least currently intent on making the expulsion happen.
Successfully expelling Matt Gaetz would require a two-thirds vote. It’s a given that all House Democrats would vote yes, so (depending on absences) somewhere in the neighborhood of 77 House Republicans would need to vote to expel Gaetz. Given that nearly 200 House Republicans just voted against Gaetz and with McCarthy on the motion to vacate, it’s not difficult to imagine that 77 of them might be angry enough at Gaetz to expel him.
Matt Gaetz is made all the more expendable by the fact that he comes from a far right House district that automatically elects Republicans. So if Gaetz is expelled, he’d just be replaced by another Republican in a special election. While there’s no pickup opportunity here for the Democrats, it does make it an even easier decision for Republicans to simply oust Gaetz before he causes them any more trouble. Now we’ll see if and when they make good on the expulsion threat that they’re leaking.
