On October 3, 2023, former Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, was ousted from his position. This was the culmination of a long-standing feud between McCarthy and a few hard right lawmakers. When McCarthy negotiated a deal with the Democrats to keep the government funded, this was the last straw for these lawmakers. This is the first time a speaker has been ejected from his position. 

McCarthy’s path to the speakership was tenuous. It required 15 rounds of voting before he was narrowly elected, on January 7. To gain the speakership he had to negotiate with hardline members of his party, and he ended up making concessions to them. One of these concessions was that any one member of his party could force a snap vote calling for his ouster. After this, he did gain the speakership, but because of that concession, his hold on it was weak. To appease the hard-line bloc he had to consistently throw them red meat such as limiting funding for Ukraine and opening a Biden impeachment inquiry. However, this wasn’t enough to make Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican, forgive him for when he worked with the Democrats.

Each year the government has to come up with a budget plan by a certain date, and if they don’t, the government shuts down. President Biden, the House Democrats, and House Republicans were having trouble finding common ground before the deadline for funding the government closed in. Then at the last minute, McCarthy made a deal with the House Democrats. The deal gave them forty-five more days to keep the government funded, and to come up with a new, more substantive deal. The bill passed the House and the Senate. President Biden signed the bill with just three hours left until a government shutdown. This bill kept the government open which the Democrats wanted, and didn’t include more military funding for Ukraine, which the hardline Republicans wanted. However, Gaetz and a few other Republicans still weren’t happy. They wanted to slash funding even more, like this deal and started talking about ousting McCarthy. A few days later he put it up to the vote. McCarthy was voted out of office.

All Democrats and eight Republicans voted McCarthy out of office. The Democrats debated for a while about whether to keep McCarthy but in the end, they had a lot of grievances against him that outweighed their concerns about an even more hardline speaker. Their logic was that he couldn’t control his own party and deserved what he got. The Republicans who voted him out also said they couldn’t trust him, claiming that they promised him things and didn’t follow through. The government funding bill was just the latest example of that. The irony of McCarthy’s ouster is that it was done over working with the opposing party, Matt Gaetz, who put the vote forward, had to work with Democrats to kick McCarthy out. 

This was a bad time for congress to be without a speaker. The Israel-Palestine conflict is raging on, and the government still will shut down if another bill isn’t made soon. Republicans have had trouble picking their next speaker. Steve Scalise, of Louisiana, was nominated but withdrew after Republicans had trouble getting all their members to line up behind him. Jim Jordan, a hardliner from Ohio, who got beaten originally by Scalise, got voted in as the republican nominee after Scalise withdrew. Then, after failing three times to achieve the speakership, he was kicked out as a nominee. Eventually there were nine Republicans fighting for the nomination, which narrowed down to one nominee, Tom Emmer, a more moderate conservative from Minnesota. Tom Emmer later withdrew after opposition from Donald Trump. Ultimately Mike Johnson, a hard right election denier from Louisiana got selected as the nominee with all the Republicans behind him. On October 25, Johnson was made speaker of the house.