This may be almost too obvious to say, but even when Kevin McCarthy was occupying the chair as speaker of the House, wasn’t the seat already vacant?
By all reports, McCarthy got zero support from Democrats in his bid to keep his position because he made no effort to negotiate with them. He had also proved himself many times over to be untrustworthy and unprincipled. He did worse than nothing; his approach to cajole the Democrats into voting to retain him was to be arrogant, perhaps aping Donald Trump’s unsurprising decision to attack the judges hearing his various civil and criminal cases.
