The House could pass the debt-ceiling deal agreed to by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and President Joe Biden, but it might ultimately cost McCarthy his job if he has to have Democrat votes to do it, Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., warned Tuesday on Newsmax.
"The operative question there is whether or not the speaker can get to a majority of the majority," Gaetz told Tuesday's "The Chris Salcedo Show." "If a majority of Republicans are against a piece of legislation, and you use Democrats to pass it, that would immediately be a black-letter violation of the deal we had with McCarthy to allow his ascent to the speakership, and it would likely trigger an immediate motion to vacate.
"I think Speaker McCarthy knows that. That's why he's working hard to make sure that he gets 120, 150, 160 votes."
Republicans control the House with a 222-213 majority, so, as Gaetz pointed out to host Chris Salcedo, McCarthy needs to whip up at least 112 Republican votes for the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023.
"That's a key number because according to the concessions that Speaker McCarthy made in January, he can only bring legislation to the floor if a majority of the majority is going to support it," Gaetz told Salcedo. "Right now, that may be in question. The first test for Speaker McCarthy is the Rules Committee. That's a committee where we've got folks who are very dead set against this bill like Chip Roy and Ralph Norman.
"So will Democrats on the Rules Committee cross over and give Speaker McCarthy what he needs to get the bill to the floor? And then will 112 Republicans indicate that they're going to vote for it?
"We cannot pass bills with a majority of the Republicans in opposition, so if folks are against this, they should reach out to their member of Congress and have their voice heard."
Gaetz is a hard no, but he was also a hard no on the previously GOP-passed House deal to raise the debt ceiling.
"I am not going to vote for this bill," Gaetz said. "I think that it doesn't put sufficient downward pressure on spending. I announced that on Newsmax the other night and what's interesting to me, Chris, is that an increasing number of members who are very close to Speaker McCarthy are now announcing their opposition; people like: Kat Cammack, Corey Mills, Michael Waltz, Russell Frye, Wesley Hunt.
"These are very much team McCarthy people, but they have announced that this isn't something that they can support.
"I didn't even vote for the first increase in the debt limit because gaslighting $49 trillion in debt over the next 10 years does a great deal of harm to the American economy, and it cuts against our principal mandate with the voters, which is to fight inflation."
Also, Gaetz concluded, a number of the features of the deal McCarthy agreed to with Biden can too easily be unwound by the president.
"Those of us who are not supportive of the bill are trying to point out that many of the changes are cosmetic in nature and Joe Biden's administration is going to be able to waive certain requirements and certain conditions that sound like great talking points, but they don't save the country from the ruin that the Biden administration is bringing us to," Gaetz lamented.
It requires just one "motion to vacate" McCarthy as speaker, spiraling the House back into a search for speaker that ultimately required 15 rounds of voting to pick McCarthy in January.
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Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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