Top US House Republican McCarthy vows to sustain his speakership despite threats ‘I’ll survive’

Top US House Republican Kevin McCarthy expected to survive a threat to his speakership after a hardline critic within his party called for his ouster following the passage of a stopgap government funding bill that drew more support from Democrats than Republicans, he said on Saturday.

Speaking to multiple US media outlets, Harline Republican Representative Matt Gaetz said he could file a “motion to vacate”, a call for a vote to remove McCarthy as speaker of the House of Representatives, which his party controls by a narrow 221-212 margin.

“I’ll survive. This is personal with Gaetz,” McCarthy told CBS News.

Former US President Donald Trump, who had encouraged Republicans in Congress to work for a government shutdown unless their budget demands were met, on Sunday said, “Republicans got very little out of the temporary government-funding deal reached this weekend.”

“I don’t know anything about those efforts but I like both of them very much,” said Trump when asked at a campaign stop in Ottumwa whether he would support a move by Gaetz to strip McCarthy of his speakership.

Trump added that McCarthy has said some “very great things about me”, Reuters reported.

Gaetz is one of a group of about two dozen hardliners who forced McCarthy to endure a withering 15 rounds of voting in January before he was elected speaker. However, it was not clear how much support McCarthy would have in such a vote, or whether any Democrats would back him.

“If at this time next week Kevin McCarthy is still speaker of the House, it will be because Democrats bailed him out. I am relentless and I will continue to pursue this objective,” Gaetz told ABC News.

McCarthy stunned Washington on Saturday when he backed a bill to fund the government through November 17, averting a partial shutdown but not imposing any of the spending cuts or changes to border security that his hardline colleagues had called for.

The bill, which was approved by the Senate on a broad bipartisan basis and signed into law by Biden, is meant to give lawmakers more time to agree on a deal to fund the government through September 30, 2024.

(With Reuters inputs)