- South Carolina Rep. Ralph Norman declared Monday night he won’t vote for House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy to be the chamber’s next speaker.
- The congressman’s declaration makes him at least the fourth Republican to officially oppose the party’s leading candidate.
- “I’m not going to support Kevin McCarthy,” Norman said during an interview on the “Just the News, No Noise” television show. “There’s a cancer in this country and it can’t be fixed with aspirin. It’s called overspending. When you’re bankrupt, you can’t function as a country.”
- Norman said one of his main points of contention with McCarthy is over the time it will take majority Republicans to bring runaway federal spending under control.
- “I had asked Mr. McCarthy during one of our meetings to agree to the seven-year budget that the Republican Study Committee had put out to pay off the deficit and to get this country back,” Norman said. “He said no. I’m simply not going along with another 20-year budget, which is what he wanted to propose.”
- Norman joins Reps. Andy Biggs of Arizona, Matt Gaetz of Florida, and Matt Rosendale of Montana in declaring they won’t support McCarthy in the official speaker’s vote in January, leaving the California Republican a narrow path to securing enough votes to win.
- McCarthy needs to win the majority of the votes cast in early January in a House in which Republicans will hold only a few seat majority over Democrats. McCarthy easily won the GOP nomination for speaker last week, but 31 Republicans voted against him.
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