McCarthy: ‘I’m Not Sure Those Eight People Are Looking to Be Productive'

McCarthy: “You know, you need 218 for the rule, 218 to move forward. And I’ll never give up on the American people. That doesn’t mean I have to be speaker to do what I have to do for the American people. There’s a lot of things I could do for the American people. But you know what’s interesting? Everybody’s sitting there. In today’s world, if you’re sitting in Congress, and you took a gamble to make sure government was still open, and eight people can throw you out as speaker, and the Democrats who said they wanted to keep government open, I think you’ve got a real divide. I think you’ve got a real institutional problem. Interesting, it was in this room, after we had won the majority, I had become speaker, and Nancy Pelosi came to me, she was speaker at the time on the way out. And I told her I was having issues with getting enough votes, she goes, ‘What’s the problem?’ I say, ‘They want this one person can rule you out.’ She was the only speaker to have changed that rule. I had the power to call the vote on her, but I never would. I lost some votes because of it. She said, ‘Just give it to ‘em. I’ll always back you up. I made the same offer to Boehner and same thing to Paul because I believe in the institution.’ I think today was a political decision by the Democrats. And I think the things they have done in the past hurt the institution. They just started removing people from committee and they just started doing other things. My fear is the institution fell today. Because you can’t do the job if eight people — you have 94% or 96% of your entire conference, but eight people can partner with the whole other side, how do you govern? And for them to make a motion on me because I made a decision for the country that they agreed with, but they choose to do the other, that becomes a problem.
Not all those eight, but these are the same people that never voted for me. They thought it was big, they went to ‘present’ after we went through 15 rounds. Why do I do something for myself that can hurt the country? Why create — I’m not quite sure those individuals are looking to be productive. It concerns me as a Republican, based upon watching what they do. I want to be a Republican and a conservative that governs. And we’re going to have to find our way to do that. The challenge is, we had so many opportunities. These are the same people that sat on the floor and criticized me that we didn’t get all 12 spending bills done, but we first had to do a debt ceiling that they didn’t support. They held up every appropriation bill in the summer because they wouldn’t let it come through. After the debt ceiling, they stopped us from doing anything on the floor. When we had a continuing resolution that would do something on the border I listened to one talk about how it made him think about the border and when he voted against it. And then they wanted to challenge me because I worked with the other side so America could go forward and government could stay open. You know, if you have to lose for something, I will always lose for the country. It is a much better battle to have.”