Rep. Matt Gaetz has issued a stark warning to House Republicans that they could be at risk of losing their slim majority.
Talking on a December 3 episode of The Charlie Kirk Show podcast, the Florida representative hit out at what he viewed as House Republicans’ “self-mutilation” over the expulsion of now former New York Rep. George Santos.
Santos was expelled from the House in a historic 311-114 vote on Friday that cleared the two-thirds threshold to pass.
Santos was elected to represent New York’s third district in November 2022 and added his vote to support the 221-213 Republican majority in the House. He was the first Republican and the first representative in more than 20 years to be expelled by House colleagues.
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Gaetz claimed the vote to expel Santos, who has protested his innocence, left House Republicans vulnerable and speculated how possible departures in the future could end their majority.
“Let’s do the math here, Charlie. We have a four-vote majority, right? Now we’ve kicked out George Santos we have a three-vote majority,” he told host Charlie Kirk.
“Congressman Bill Johnson of Ohio has taken a college university presidency, that could knock us down to two and I don’t think [former House Speaker] Kevin McCarthy is sticking around long. Every image of his office shows he’s packing things up in boxes, so we could be down to a one-seat majority.
“We’ve got a bunch of these octogenarians in our conference. If God forbid any of them were to cross the rainbow bridge, we would be in a situation where we could literally lose the majority because we were so eager to throw George Santos out before being convicted.
“It is not in accordance with the precedent. It is not in accordance with due process and it is just tactically freaking stupid.”
The extract of the podcast was uploaded to X, formerly known as Twitter, by Ron Filipkowski of the MeidasTouch Network, which bills itself as a pro-democracy community, and received more than 347,500 views since being posted on December 2.
Filipkowski, a former federal prosecutor and Florida GOP official, claimed in a response to the post containing the clip that: “Lots of people have been saying he will be gone before Christmas.”
Newsweek has contacted Gaetz and McCarthy’s offices for comment via email.
According to Pew Research, the median age of House Republicans in Congress is 57.4 years compared to the Democrats’ 58.1 years.
It also found that 5 percent of House members were born between 1928 and 1945, with Baby Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, making up 45 percent of the lower chamber.
The remaining representatives were made up of the younger Generation Z, born after 1996, Millennials, born between 1981 and 1996, and Generation X, who were born between 1965 to 1980.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.