Who voted Kevin McCarthy out? These 8 House Republicans. (2024)

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Biggs, a long-standing conservative opponent of McCarthy’s, previously mounted failed challenges to his leadership. On Tuesday, Biggs said McCarthy had failed as an effective leader. “He has gone against many of the promises he made in January and can no longer be trusted at the helm,” Biggs said on X, formerly known as Twitter. Biggs vocally opposed the stopgap bill and instead demanded that the House move forward on all 12 GOP appropriations bills to fund the government in fiscal 2024.

“It allows you to reduce spending, get rid of wasteful duplicative programs. It allows you to set an agenda to restore fiscal sanity. We chose to not do it again,” Biggs told the floor. “This body is entrenched in a suboptimal path and refuses to leave it.”

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Buck is a member of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, who said he voted to oust McCarthy for reasons of fiscal responsibility. “We cannot continue to fund the government by continuing resolutions and omnibus spending bills,” he said on X.

In an interview with Newsmax, he also criticized McCarthy’s personal leadership style, accusing him of rewarding self-interest among lawmakers. “He makes sure that he hands out chairmanships and subcommittee chairmanships and special favors to a large group of people — and that’s the way the system works here,” Buck said Tuesday evening.

Separately, Buck has become an unlikely critic of the GOP’s impeachment efforts. After McCarthy launched an impeachment inquiry into President Biden last month, Buck wrote in an op-ed for The Washington Post that it was effectively based on a myth. “Republicans in the House who are itching for an impeachment are relying on an imagined history,” Buck wrote. “But impeachment is a serious matter and should have a foundation of rock-solid facts.”

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Gaetz — the staunchly pro-Trump Floridian and most vocal of McCarthy’s critics — had threatened for months to oust the House speaker if he relied on Democratic votes to pass legislation. Two days after McCarthy passed a stopgap measure with Democratic support, Gaetz followed through on the threat, bringing the motion to vacate and kicking off the process that ultimately toppled McCarthy.

In the chamber, Gaetz was booed by fellow Republicans and prevented from sitting with them during the debate. “I’ll make this argument at any desk in this building, from the well, from the chair. I’ll make it on every street corner in this country — that Washington must change,” Gaetz said from the minority Democratic side of the chamber.

His decision to pursue McCarthy has cost him the confidence of fellow Republicans, The Washington Post reported — even putting him at risk of formal dismissal from the conference.

“If they want to expel me, let me know when they have the votes,” Gaetz said.

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Mace, whose moderate views on abortion rights have previously pitted her against conservatives in her party, said McCarthy had not fulfilled promises — including those that would have helped women.

After the vote, she wrote on X that McCarthy “has not lived up to his word on how the House would operate.” In particular, she accused him of being slow to hammer out a spending bill and failing to live up to promises on legislation around safety and women’s issues, as well as presiding over “chaos.”

She told reporters that McCarthy did not keep pledges to her to expand access to reproductive health care, including birth control and rape kits. “I’ve made deals with Kevin McCarthy, with the speaker, that he has not kept to help women in this country,” she said after the vote.

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Burchett — who describes himself as a “fiscally conservative Republican” — said before Tuesday’s vote that he feared the country was facing “financial ruin.” He made the comment in a video filmed outside the Capitol and posted on X.

“We failed to do our job and then passed a temporary spending bill to extend the deadline like we do every year,” he said, describing McCarthy as a friend. “I hate to lose him as a friend, but I have a choice between that and my conscience,” he said. “My conscience tells me that we’re $33 trillion in debt.”

Last week, Burchett suggested Republicans could pass a 14-day continuing resolution to avoid a shutdown, which would give them time to pass the appropriations bills.

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Crane, a U.S. Navy veteran elected to the House in November, was a staunch critic of McCarthy’s decision to rely on Democratic support to pass Saturday’s stopgap bill. “I will use every single tool at my disposal to break the cycle of incompetency and dishonesty that’s been allowed to steamroll the American people for far too long,” Crane said on X on Tuesday, ahead of the vote.

He is among a small group of freshman Republicans who self-identifies as a “Never CR” voice, meaning they have vowed to oppose continuing resolutions, or stopgap funding proposals. “I’m opposed to it because, in principle, it’s what happens up here consistently,” Crane said last month. “Even as a freshman, I know that, right? It’s the old, ‘Oh, we’re going to do a CR.’ As if we haven’t had nine months to do what we’re supposed to do and pass the appropriation bills.”

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Good — a former banker at Citibank — was one of about 20 hard-liners who initially opposes McCarthy’s bid to become speaker in January, denouncing him at one point as a member of the “swamp cartel” and accusing him of inadequately proving his conservative credentials.

In a floor speech Tuesday, Good criticized McCarthy for relying on Democratic votes to pass the stopgap funding bill and avoid “a temporary discomfort and the pressure” of a federal government shutdown. “If you’re not willing to say ‘no,’ then you’re guaranteed to lose,” Good said.

“The American people need a Speaker who will fight to keep the promises Republicans made to get the majority, not someone who cuts fiscally irresponsible deals that get more Democrat votes than Republican votes,” he tweeted.

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Rosendale, one of six Republicans who never voted for McCarthy in the January race to put him in the leadership post, said the then-speaker “violated his promise” to the Republican conference and the American people over the weekend.

“Instead of putting pressure on the Senate, Kevin McCarthy sold every American short,” he said in a statement shared with Fox News on Tuesday, criticizing the House leadership’s decision to support the stopgap spending bill.

Rosendale is a consistent self-described opponent of such continuing resolutions. “It’s not the way to fund government,” he said last month. “It simply extends [former House speaker] Nancy Pelosi’s spending and Joe Biden’s policies. I voted against them for two years, so I’m not going to begin voting for them right now.”

Marianna Sotomayor, Leigh Ann Caldwell, Amy B Wang, Paul Kane, Mariana Alfaro, Theodoric Meyer contributed to this report.