The House Republican Conference is still entrenched in an internal war over whether to reinstate an arcane rule that would empower any member to bring up a vote to oust a speaker at any time.
The bitter divide is only heating up and has emerged center stage in House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy’s quest for 218 votes to win the position. For McCarthy’s backers, the so-called motion to vacate is seen as little more than a promise of hostage taking, a tool that could be used by the right flank to hamstring McCarthy’s ability to lead the conference and effectively govern.
“There’s a reason [the motion to vacate] already got debated. You can’t govern with a gun to your head and that is what they are asking for. It makes us highly unstable, and it lays out the potential too for Democrats to take advantage of this and create absolute chaos,” Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a Texas Republican, told CNN. “There is a reason people are against it. You can scream the word accountability all you want … in the end it’s just a path to chaos, not stability, and we are going to have to be very united and very stable if we are going to govern properly.”
