Rep. Matt Gaetz predicted on Sunday that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy would be ousted from his post before the end of the week.
The Fort Walton Beach Republican added that if McCarthy is still on the job next weekend, it will be because Democrats bailed him out.
“This is an exercise to see who really governs you,” Gaetz told ABC News on Sunday after confirming his intention to file a resolution seeking McCarthy’s removal, which is promised after weeks of build-up and threats by Gaetz.
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Gaetz fired his salvo at McCarthy after the speaker orchestrated a deal to adopt a continuing resolution to keep the federal government funded for another 45 days.
The bill passed the Senate and was signed by President Joe Biden on Saturday night, just three hours before the federal government would have shut down, according to the Epoch Times.
Gaetz said conservatives in Congress are tired of how the federal budget has been managed for decades, going from one continuing resolution to the next and then voting on the entire federal budget at once in a massive spending bill.
The congressman argued that is why the federal government is now $33 trillion in debt, and looking at perpetual $2 trillion budget deficits.
It’s also the reason to remove McCarthy, he added to ABC News, because single-issue spending bills was one of the pledges McCarthy made to become the House leader.
“Speaker McCarthy made an agreement with House conservatives in January and since then he’s been in brazen, repeated material breach of that agreement,” Gaetz told CNN in a separate interview on Sunday. “This agreement that he made with Democrats to really blow past a lot of the spending guardrails we set up is a last straw.”
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Gaetz also said that McCarthy had cut a “secret deal” to push through funding for the Ukraine war that was removed from the bill Biden signed. House conservatives opposed more aid to Ukraine in its war with Russia.
“So as he was baiting Republicans to vote for a continuing resolution without Ukraine money, saying that we were going to jam the Senate on Ukraine, he then turns around and makes a secret deal,” Gaetz said.
Additionally, he told CNN, “I will make no deal with Democrats and concede no terms to them. I actually think Democrats should vote against Speaker McCarthy for free.”
“The one thing everybody has in common is that nobody trusts Kevin McCarthy. He lied to Biden, he lied to House conservatives. He had appropriators marking to a different number altogether. And the reason we were backed up against the shutdown politics is not a bug of the system. It’s a feature.”
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