House Republican Blasts ‘Useful Idiots’ In His Party Who ‘Torpedoed the Conference’
When Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) was ousted from his position as Speaker of the House on Tuesday, the vast majority of his own party supported him and voted in his favor. Now, in the aftermath, some of those Republican representatives are speaking out against the eight, far-right members of Congress who kiboshed their best chance at getting anything on their legislative agenda done.
MSNBC’s Katy Tur welcomed guest Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) on her show on Wednesday, introducing him as an up and coming “power broker” in the GOP conference. And her first question was whether he believed that the man who led the charge to oust McCarthy, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), should be expelled:
Oh, I think he should be expelled from the conference. No question. He violated the conference rules by bringing the motion to vacate forward without a majority of the majority and teamed up with 208 Democrats to remove a duly elected House Republican speaker. He undermined the conference, he undermined the institution, and he undermined the country, and he doesn’t care. And so to me, I don’t really see why we would have him part of our conference going forward. It’s clear he’s not somebody who’s willing to work within the conference and wants to associate himself more with House Democrats to remove a Republican speaker. So I certainly believe that he should be removed from conference.
But Gaetz isn’t the only one in trouble here. Lawler called out the other seven representatives who sided with Gaetz and the Democrats:
I think, unfortunately, you know, some of them were useful idiots in this crusade. On Matt Gaetz’s part it was petty, it was personal. And it really, again, undermined the conference and the institution. Look, voters elected a House Republican majority to govern the House, to serve as a check and balance on the reckless spending of the Biden administration. Five trillion dollars in new spending in two years, totally unsustainable. And they wanted us to do something about the border. Unfortunately, these eight individuals torpedoed the conference and took out our best player on the field, if you will, and created a constitutional crisis.
Earlier on Wednesday, another Republican representative from New York, Rep. Anthony D’Esposito told CNN that the ouster was “one of the greatest acts of heresy” he’d ever seen, calling Gaetz a “hypocrite” and accusing the far-right GOP faction of using House rules to “commit terrorist acts.”
Watch the video above via MSNBC.
