by Brendan Clementz

The US government is in hot water with an impending government shutdown. Congress was in talks about raising the debt ceiling back in May due to concerns about reaching the debt ceiling. However, the House and Senate have failed to work together on keeping the agreement that they came to, and now they face the exact problem they were supposed to prevent. 

The former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, was between a rock and a hard place. His fellow Republicans in the House are in the majority, and they’ve been putting pressure on McCarthy not to work with Democrats.

According to CNN, “If we have to begin every single day in Congress with the prayer, the pledge and the motion to vacate then so be it,” Matt Gaetz, a fellow Republican, said when threatening to call to oust McCarthy. 

Matt Gaetz made good on his threat on Tuesday, October 3 and forced a vote to oust McCarthy as Speaker. The vote came to 216 to 210 in favor of ousting the now former Speaker. 

McCarthy may have needed to go against the will of Republican hardliners and work with the Democrats of the House if he wanted to put legislation through that will stop this government shutdown, but even hinting at doing so came at the cost of his job.

Relations between Democrats and Republicans in Congress are rocky, to say the least. The reason why we’re currently facing this shutdown is thanks to a lack of agreement between the two parties. 

Some of the swing House Republicans are looking into discharge petitions, which would allow them to bypass the Speaker and put a bipartisan funding bill in the running. However, the process to do such a thing is too lengthy to actually prevent the shutdown at this point, but could help the shutdown go by faster. 

Last Saturday, McCarthy called the Republican conference and was pushing the people there to support a short-term spending bill so they could delay the shutdown and hash things out with all the members of the House.

Just before the deadline of October 1, Biden worked with legislators to pass a stopgap bill to delay the shutdown, but if the new Speaker and the rest of the House don’t manage to smooth things over soon, there will be serious consequences for the American people.