The USA is threatened with a government shutdown of catastrophic proportions. While Chamber Speaker Kevin McCarthy is desperately trying to bring his Republicans into line, right-wingers are mutinying. The chaos creator and ringleader: Matt Gaetz. Once again.
In January 2023, Kevin Owen McCarthy won the third most powerful political office in the USA, that of Speaker of the House of Representatives. It was an expensive purchase in installments. Now it’s time to pay. “I know that Washington is not known for keeping its word. Speaker McCarthy, I’m here to remind you of your word,” says right-wing Rep. Matt Gaetz nine months later.
While the US government is threatened with a shutdown and hundreds of thousands of public servants with unpaid leave, the 41-year-old Trumpist from Florida is openly threatening his “class representative” with rebellion. For the second time this week. It’s not a toothless growl. Theoretically, the vote of a single MP is enough for a vote of no confidence against McCarthy. And Gaetz is not alone.
And so bazaar is opened. Once again.
Matt Gaetz and the Brazen Seven
January 2023. McCarthy’s struggle for the office of speaker turns into haggling and ultimately begging. Matt Gaetz, by far the most vocal of the “Never Kevins”, caused an absurd climax on the third day of voting when he proposed former President Donald Trump for the speaker’s position.
In order to end the mutiny of the right wing of the party, McCarthy is forced to make all sorts of concessions. He goes down on his knees in front of the right winger, saws at his throne in order to be able to climb onto it. In the end, it takes 15 rounds of voting before McCarthy has calmed down, not satisfied, the contentious hardliners in his party. In the end, the entire party was embarrassed.
In the end, Gaetz doesn’t vote for McCarthy, but he doesn’t vote against McCarthy either. He is one of only six MPs who give him the cold shoulder until the end. “If you want to drain the swamp, you can’t entrust the biggest alligator with the job,” he argued.
Gaetz doesn’t keep his feet still for long. In the months that followed, he threw obstacles in the way of the new House speaker whenever and however he could – as if to remind McCarthy that the wind still blows strongest from the right. At the end of September it finally became clear what the Pyrrhic victory against right-wingers cost McCarthy. In his desperate attempt to somehow bring the party into line in the budget dispute and at the same time keep the hardliners happy, he can only lose. He doesn’t have the power to say anything. The embarrassment, it seems, is inevitable. And Gaetz is doing everything he can to ensure that there are no changes to the program.
Hardly any party colleague hates McCarthy so openly and so passionately. According to a report in the New York Times, Gaetz bragged to McCarthy behind closed doors on Wednesday that he had seven MPs “unwaveringly” on his side. Together they would torpedo any compromise – even if it was only an interim solution. Gaetz wants the shutdown, at least for a few days.
Who is the man who desires chaos?
The quick-change artist from the south
To Matt Gaetz’s right there is only the wall. When he loses himself in his angry speeches, he sometimes looks like a high school bully in a tailored suit. Like a guy who’s always liked to argue, if only for the sake of arguing. Gaetz sees any attempt to find a bipartisan compromise – even if only to prevent a government shutdown – as a betrayal of his conservative values.
That doesn’t mean he’s a lone wolf. Despite ideological overlaps and a lot of common enemies, he says he is not a member of the party’s ever-increasing ultra-right-wing Freedom Caucus. Gaetz also hustles well without a group label. Next to Marjorie Taylor Greene, he has one of the loudest voices in the right corner of the House of Representatives. Just like the Georgia representative, he is an ardent supporter of former President Donald Trump.
Although he himself rose in its wake, he strongly denounces the political opportunism carried out by comparatively moderate colleagues like McCarthy. The irony: Hardly anyone has reinvented themselves as often as Gaetz. As a representative in Florida, he was seen as someone who would compromise party interests and power struggles when necessary. That changed when he moved to Washington in 2017. In no time, he became one of Trump’s most verbally vicious chain dogs.
The next Ron DeSantis?
Gaetz’s anti-Kevin attitude has turned into openly displayed hatred in recent weeks. He repeatedly accused McCarty of breaking his word, of being a liar, and even called him “pathetic.” Party colleagues told the US magazine Politico that Gaetz’s campaign was probably based on personal antipathy – although they did not know how the chamber speaker could have angered the Florida representative. The two reached a sad climax in their public feud on Thursday when McCarthy and Gaetz verbally attacked each other in an already heated debate. The Floridian accused the speaker of paying influencers to specifically attack him on social media. McCarthy countered that he “wouldn’t waste his time or money on him.”
The fact that a representative adopts such a tone towards his own majority leader speaks volumes. It is testimony to the deep divisions in the Grand Old Party, to a generally toxic political climate and, above all, to the helplessness of what is by definition the third most powerful man in the USA. Gaetz says what many think: that McCarthy’s dignity in office rests solely on the mercy of hardliners.
The question still remains as to what Gaetz expects from his sometimes completely disproportionate stubbornness. Because ideological straightforwardness is certainly one, but not the only, motivation. Experts and party colleagues suspect that Gaetz is primarily interested in the spotlight as such. With his thrashing rhetoric, he could, for example, position himself as a right-wing TV commentator in the future (greetings from Tucker Carlson). What is more likely, however, is that Gaetz could aim for the office of governor of Florida – even if he himself denies any ambitions in that case. Whatever the outcome of Ron DeSantis’ lame race for the Republican presidential nomination, he will probably remain Florida’s sovereign until 2026. After that, DeSantis definitely has to leave the governor’s mansion. It would be the opportunity for Gaetz, the logical next step – if he can consolidate his role as a rebel by then. A role that can make a career in the modern GOP.
Whatever Matt Gaetz plans to do, his cards could be worse. Or as he himself put it this week: “Looking at the events of the last two weeks, things seem to be going my way.”
Sources: “Politico“; “Axios“; “Washington Post“; “Wall Street Journal“; “New York Times“