Mr. McCarthy did not answer questions from reporters after his ouster, striding quickly off the floor after receiving a barrage of handshakes and hugs from his allies. In the hours before the vote, Mr. McCarthy, an inveterate optimist who prides himself on never giving up, was characteristically sanguine, defending his decision to work with Democrats to avert a government shutdown, which precipitated the bid to remove him.
“If you throw a speaker out that has 99 percent of their conference, that kept government open and paid the troops, I think we’re in a really bad place for how we’re going to run Congress,” he said on Tuesday morning. In a closed-door meeting underneath the Capitol, he told Republicans he had no regrets about his speakership, and was interrupted several times by raucous standing ovations.
In the days leading up to the vote, Democrats had wrestled with whether to help Mr. McCarthy survive, or at least to stay out of the effort to oust him.
But their disdain for Mr. McCarthy ultimately overrode any political will they had to save him, and in a closed-door meeting on Tuesday morning, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the minority leader, instructed fellow Democrats not to do so, citing Republicans’ “unwillingness to break from MAGA extremism.”
That meeting, which was billed as a listening session and strategy meeting to determine how Democrats would vote on Mr. Gaetz’s motion to remove Mr. McCarthy, quickly became an airing of grievances against the speaker.
