Trump, Florida Democrats apparently decided Speaker Kevin McCarthy not worth saving

Often at bitter odds, Florida's congressional Democrats and Donald Trump found a common denominator this week — they didn't see a point in rescuing House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Trump, who polls say is the leading GOP presidential candidate, had helped McCarthy win the speakership in January after 15 rounds of voting. But Trump did not make a public effort or appeal to spare McCarthy the humiliation of becoming the first speaker in U.S. history to be removed through a so-called motion to vacate filed by Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz.

Gaetz will appear with Trump at a Club 47 USA event at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach on Oct. 11. Both are expected to speak.

All House Democrats from Florida joined eight Republican House rebels to record the 216 votes necessary to oust McCarthy. The scene in the House of Representatives was seemingly incongruous as liberals and progressives joined what are among the most ardent MAGA members — a minority within a minority that critics have called a fringe of the fringe — that Democrats have often been sharply critical of.

What gives?

“I think part of it is a political calculation, that if the House seems in turmoil, then Republicans will probably get the blame for that," said Aubrey Jewett, a politics professor at the University of Central Florida. “I think, for a lot of congressional Democrats, they're betting that it is dysfunction and problems of Congress will largely be blamed on Republicans, and that will help them politically.”

Besides, he added, “it’s not the Democrats' job to save a Republican speaker.”

Congressional Democrats: McCarthy was an untrustworthy leader

Congressional Democrats said the reason they voted to fire McCarthy was all about trust, not political gamesmanship.

U.S. Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, a Democrat who represents a West Palm Beach-area congressional district, said in an interview prior to the vote that she planned to vote against McCarthy because he has been deceptive.

"I think that all of us who are trying to lead our districts around the country, we realize that we've come to a place where we can't work with someone who's a known liar," Cherfilus-McCormick said.

U.S. Rep. Lois Frankel, a decade-long congressional Democrat representing West Palm Beach, said she agreed on one point with the far-right firebrand who started the motion to fire McCarthy — Florida U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Pensacola. That one point, she said, was that "Kevin McCarthy cannot be trusted."

Beyond that, Frankel and her colleagues said they were not about to throw McCarthy a lifeline to save him and the GOP majority from a tempest of their creation.

"This place is dysfunctional, but, you know what, it's dysfunctional because of the Republicans. They are the ones fighting. And we can't really heal them. They have to heal themselves," Frankel said.

Frankel's frustrations with McCarthy included the California Republican's accusations that the debt-ceiling negotiation standoffs last May were the fault of Democrats.

U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Weston, agreed the matter was a "Republican crisis" and she would not cast a vote to "bail" them out.

“House Republicans are in chaos and the extreme conservatives in control of Congress right now only want paralysis and dysfunction,” Wasserman Schultz said in a statement. “I will not embolden extremists, and I will not vote to bail out a Speaker who enables them and who simply cannot be trusted. This is a Republican crisis that only they can solve.”

Kevin McCarthy ousted: Matt Gaetz becomes first Congressman to remove House speaker in U.S. history

Trump lamented GOP in-fighting, although he too has blasted fellow Republicans

Trump's lone comment on the GOP's civil war on Capitol Hill simply lamented the intraparty strife.

"Why is it that Republicans are always fighting among themselves, why aren't they fighting the Radical Left Democrats who are destroying our Country?" he wrote in a social media post.

Trump's statement overlooked that he himself has often torn into Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and targeted others for defeat in primary elections. He has harshly criticized other congressional Republicans as "RINOs" — a disparaging acronym for "Republicans in name only."

That said, Trump and McCarthy were not exactly ideological soulmates. For example, the former president supported a debt default and a government shutdown while the California lawmaker worked feverishly to avert both.

But they sort of owed each other.

In late January 2021, McCarthy ventured to Mar-a-Lago where Trump was living in a sort of post-Jan. 6 exile. The McCarthy-Trump meeting was the opening balm in restoring Trump, who was badly damaged politically after the violence at the U.S. Capitol just weeks before.

That day, Trump's Save America PAC said the two men had a "very good and cordial" meeting. "President Trump has agreed to work with Leader McCarthy on helping the Republican Party to become a majority in the House," Save America added.

Thanks in part to the détente McCarthy provided, Trump regained the reins of GOP leadership and gave a comeback speech at the Conservative Political Action Committee convention in Orlando a month later.

Trump then backed McCarthy's election as House speaker last January. During the deadlock, House cameras caught U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, on the chamber's floor handing a cell phone with Trump purportedly on the line to anti-McCarthy GOP Rep. Matt Rosendale.

After winning the post, in a late Friday night vote that saw a brief scuffle on the House floor, McCarthy thanked Trump for making, literally, 11th-hour phone calls “helping get those final votes.”

On Tuesday, Trump's attention was elsewhere — his business fraud trial

While Trump took a pass on the McCarthy saga, the majority of his posts on the Truth Social platform have railed and raged against the judge hearing the ongoing $250 million civil suit against the family business empire.

A New York judge last week found Donald Trump and his family business fraudulently inflated the value of Trump Organization property and assets. The values were used to obtain better terms on real-estate loans and insurance policies.

Justice Arthur Engoron of New York state court in Manhattan makes it easier for state Attorney General Letitia James to establish damages in a trial taking place this week.

Trump and his companies could be forced to pay damages for the profits they allegedly made through fraudulent business practices. The trial also could lead to Trump being banned from real estate transactions in New York.

In a mid-morning post on Tuesday, Trump claimed the judge "has been given false and grossly misleading information" by James. The post was just one of a series of more than a dozen posts about the case.

On Tuesday afternoon, while the House prepared to vote on McCarthy's future, Engoron issued a partial gag order in the case intended to prevent verbal attacks on court staff.

The order applies to all parties in the case but appears to follow a Trump post. In the missive, Trump called a staff member the "girlfriend" of Senate Majority Leader and New York Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer and included a photo of Schumer and the female law clerk.

What happens now?

Republican House members have said they will gather next week to start the process of choosing a new speaker. In the meantime, U.S. Rep. Patrick Henry, R-N.C., serves as interim speaker, albeit with limited authority.

The schedule gives the GOP majority, with a number of their members seething at Gaetz and the other seven, a relatively short time to bridge divisions before voting on a new speaker. Then the difficult work begins to forge consensus on a spending bill due before Thanksgiving.

For the minority Democrats who joined to oust McCarthy, Jewett said the calculation is clear.

“They’re taking the chance that whoever is chosen as the next Republican Speaker will be will be at least as good as McCarthy or not or, you know, at least not the worse,“ he said.

Palm Beach Post reporter Alexandra Clough contributed to this story.

Antonio Fins is a politics and business editor at The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach him at afins@pbpost.com. Help support our journalism. Subscribe today.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Trump nor Florida Democrats saved House Speaker from Gaetz motion