“Kevin McCarthy and I are together again,” To Fox News Digital, Rep. Carlos Gimenez said
ONLY IN: Republican Rep. Carlos Gimenez of Florida will not vote for either of the officially named candidates for speaker. Instead, he told Fox News Digital on Tuesday night that he would back former Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California on the House floor.
In the week since McCarthy was removed from office by a majority vote of eight extreme Republicans and all 200 Democrats in the House, Gimenez has stood by him.
“I want to stay with Kevin McCarthy. “What happened to him was wrong, and I don’t want to be a part of it,” Gimenez said. “I’ll continue to vote for Kevin until Kevin tells me that he’s no longer a candidate.”
He left early from a House GOP meeting that was closed to the public. Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., and Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, were making their last arguments before a closed-door conference vote on Wednesday morning to choose the new RNC leader.
On Tuesday, McCarthy told reporters that he had asked Republicans not to vote for him in the closed-door vote on Wednesday.
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Gimenez said, “[McCarthy] asked you not to put him forward.” That doesn’t mean “Stop voting for me.”
Kevin McCarthy would have done the exact same thing that Scalise and Jordan are going to do. He asked, “Then why choose to change?”
Gimenez said, “I’m a big fan of movies, but I don’t see them over and over again.” This was his reason for leaving the candidate meeting early. I already saw this movie, so I didn’t want to look at it again.
He repeated his plan to vote on Wednesday and said he would once again support McCarthy.
Gimenez also said that he thinks other people will do the same.
The Republicans have a very narrow majority in the House, so if enough people do it, it could be hard for them to win. If someone wants to be speaker, they can only lose four votes and still get the majority votes they need to win.
Republicans in the House are still discussing whether to raise the number of votes needed to choose a speaker from a simple majority of the conference to a majority of 217 members of the House.
