North Dakota Republican Rep. Kelly Armstrong told Newsmax Tuesday that many House GOP members will fight Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., and his resolution to boot Speaker McCarthy from his position because there is “no replacement” for McCarthy within the Republican Conference, leading to “chaos.”
“[Removing the speaker] is unprecedented. It has only happened twice before,” Armstrong said during “Wake Up America” Tuesday. “[GOP members] are here now and we are going to fight [the move] because there is no replacement. A coup without a replacement is really just chaos and we have a lot of work to do for the American people right now.”
Gaetz officially moved to eject McCarthy from the speaker’s chair Monday, introducing a “motion to vacate” that would force a floor vote in the House to remove the California Republican, Reuters reported.
According to the report, Gaetz believes his motion will fail in the end, but could lead to further attempts in the future.
"I think that's the likely outcome," Gaetz said in the report. But in leaving open the prospect of repeated moves to get McCarthy fired, Gaetz predicted that support could grow and that the initial vote on evicting McCarthy would be "the floor and not the ceiling."
Armstrong said Gaetz is one of a “small number” of House Republicans upset with the recent stopgap spending bill approved and signed by President Joe Biden over the weekend to avoid a government shutdown, although Republicans did get the victory of no new aid for Ukraine in the bill that passed.
He said that the rumor that McCarthy made a deal with Democrats to give Ukraine more money later in exchange for their votes on the bill, “never happened.”
“It didn't happen, and the reason I know it didn't happen as I was told to negotiate [the spending bill] on floor, and I can tell you when we walked out of conference Saturday morning, we didn't know if Democrats were going to support it,” he said. “We had no idea. So, there's always going to be a forced vote on Ukraine. This was always going to happen. The Senate and the White House are going to demand it. Our number one goal in there was to negotiate border security and in government spending.”
He said further Ukraine spending does not have to be part of the next funding bill, due by Nov. 17, and that any such future legislation must account for the dollars being spent.
“There are three different factions right there,” he said. “People who support [aid] under any circumstances. There are people who don't support it, and then there's a group, like me, that says we should have a presence there, but we should also have a plan a strategy and accountability about negotiating where we can get to the best place in the Republican Conference.”
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Charles Kim ✉
Charles Kim, a Newsmax general assignment writer, is an award-winning journalist with more than 30 years in reporting on news and politics.
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