Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is siding with members of the GOP who voted to oust House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
Ramaswamy, who has never held elected office, said he understood McCarthy’s critics and supported the desire to inject “chaos” into the legislature.
“The point of removing the House Speaker was to sow chaos. That’s what the critics of Matt Gaetz and everybody else is saying,” Ramaswamy said Tuesday in a video posted to social media. “And my advice to the people who voted to remove him is [to] own it.”
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“Admit it. There was no better plan of action of who’s going to fill that Speaker role. So was the point to sow chaos? Yes, it was,” Ramaswamy said. “But the real question to ask, to get to the bottom of it, is whether chaos is really such a bad thing?”
Eight hard-line Republican lawmakers joined every present House Democrat in Tuesday’s historic vote to oust McCarthy from the top job.
“We’re concerned about the future of the conservative agenda in the house,” said Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla, who was the informal leader of McCarthy’s critics.”I would say that the conservative agenda was being paralyzed by Speaker McCarthy.”
McCarthy said Gaetz’s move was “personal” and suggested it was done in retaliation for an ongoing Ethics Committee investigation into his conduct.
McCarthy angered hardliners over the weekend when he passed a short-term spending bill known as a continuing resolution (CR) to keep the government open for 45 days in order to avert a government shutdown and give lawmakers more time to cobble together 12 individual spending bills.
Ninety House Republicans voted against the CR on Saturday, arguing that it was a “clean” extension of the previous Democrat-held Congress’ policies. But the speaker’s previous attempts to put a CR on the table that would cut spending for its short duration were upended by several of those same conservatives who were opposed to any such measure on principle.
Ramaswamy listed a series of issues facing the US that he feels do not yet have a solution in motion — the national debt, border crisis, lawlessness in cities, and more — and said a comprehensive plan was more important than a “babysitter” to “shepherd” votes.
“For everybody out there who’s asking the question, ‘What’s the plan to get a new speaker?’ — you’re asking the wrong question,” Ramaswamy said. “What’s the plan to actually revive this country?”
Fox News Digital’s Elizabeth Elkind , Brandon Gillespie, and Jamie Joseph contributed to this report.