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Kevin McCarthy May Not Become Speaker If Republicans Win Back The House

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OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.


The Republicans have a fantastic chance of winning back the House of Representatives in the 2022 midterm elections but that may not mean that Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is going to be the new Speaker.

It appears he will face a fight of Republican Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has her way, Mediaite reported.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) has a podcast now, called Firebrand. He was joined by fellow pro-Trump stalwart Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who weighed in on the growing battle within the Republican Party — suggesting that House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) “doesn’t have the votes” to become speaker if the GOP flips the House in 2022.

Greene’s comments come on the heels of a recent report claiming that former President Donald Trump is keeping McCarthy on a short leash, leveraging his support for McCarthy’s speakership bid to keep him in line.

CNN’s Melanie Zanona wrote Wednesday that “if Trump were to publicly or even privately come out against McCarthy — or encourage someone else to challenge him — it would almost certainly create a math problem for McCarthy.”

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“We know that Kevin McCarthy has a problem in our conference. He doesn’t have the full support to be speaker. He doesn’t have the votes that are there, because there’s many of us that are very unhappy about the failure to hold Republicans accountable,” the Georgia representative said.

She also had some demands for Rep. McCarthy if he wants her support for becoming the new Speaker, including giving the boot to Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who she called “traitors.”

“Cheney was essentially stripped of her membership in the Republican Party because Republicans in Wyoming are so offended she would even have the nerve to call herself a Republican,” she said.

She also said that that Rep. John Katko, “is not a Republican, he’s a Democrat,” because he voted to pass the recent infrastructure bill.

And she went after the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), as she said, “The NRCC needs to stop playing this majority-maker game” by bringing moderate Republicans to positions of power.

In an interview with Fox News host Maria Bartiromo’s “Sunday Morning Futures” program, McCarthy discussed rumors that Pelosi was considering retirement ahead of what many believe is shaping up to be a Democratic political washout a year from now during the midterm elections.

“I wonder if [House] Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi [D-Calif.] will even be here,” he speculated.

“She acts like a lame-duck Speaker,” he said. “She seems like she is on a farewell tour.”

Earlier, CNN reported:

After taking back the House in 2018, Nancy Pelosi called herself “a bridge to the next generation of leaders” and agreed to a deal: she’d serve again as speaker for no more than four years.

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Time is now ticking — and no one knows what Pelosi will do in 2022.

Confidantes of the 81-year-old speaker reject any rumors she might quit before the end of this Congress, saying doing so would only embolden Republicans and undercut her ability to raise millions to save her party’s imperiled majority. She has yet to say if she will mount a reelection bid next year, though her campaign continues to raise millions in case she runs for the seat she’s held since 1987.

While Pelosi has previously indicated that this is her last term as speaker, she hasn’t completely shut the door quite yet, fueling speculation she could ultimately seek to prolong her 18-year tenure ruling the House Democratic caucus.

“Everyone assumes this is her last term, but no one knows for sure,” one of the confidantes said to CNN. “People don’t realize how hard it was to win (the speaker’s race) last time.”

In his interview with Bartiromo, the Minority Leader also discussed his eight-hour marathon House floor speech last week aimed at delaying a vote on President Biden’s massive “Build Back Better” legislation, which passed essentially along party lines.

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Declaring that the Biden administration every day proves that “big government socialism isn’t working,” he added that lessons from a year of “one-party rule” by Democrats are clear.

“What we really found was … big government socialism isn’t working. It is not working when we have the highest inflation in 31 years. These gas prices — the big government cripples American industry but begs OPEC and Russia to produce more. When our military is focused on woke-ism instead of defeating and winning and keeping up with China,” he said.

“We watched our attorney general now in a big government socialism, turns and goes after parents. … that’s what drove me to keep talking [against the Build Back Better bill]. So the American people could understand,” he added.

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