By Catie Edmondson, Luke Broadwater and Carl Hulse

WASHINGTON — House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said he planned to call a vote Tuesday (3) on the right-wing move to oust him from his post, after declaring that he had no intention of giving Democrats concessions in exchange for helping him survive.

“I’m confident,” McCarthy said of his ability to defeat the effort to remove him, as he dismissed the idea of making a deal with Democrats. He said he had told Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-NY, the minority leader, “You guys do whatever you need to do” on the vote.

Either McCarthy or one of his allies is expected to try to quash the effort to oust him, led by Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, by asking the House to “table”, or kill, Gaetz’s resolution. But the speaker’s slim majority and the number of right-wing rebels in favour of ousting him mean he has little chance of winning that vote — which requires a majority — without at least some support from Democrats.

But Jeffries instructed members of his caucus during a closed-door meeting not to bail out McCarthy, according to a person who attended, in a move that appeared to close off the California Republican’s best chance of surviving the challenge.

“We’re not voting in any way that would help Speaker McCarthy,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington said, adding, “Nobody trusts Kevin McCarthy, and why should they?”

The House was scheduled to hold its first votes of the day around 1:30 p.m.

— A vacancy in the speaker’s chair would essentially paralyze the House until a successor is chosen, according to multiple procedural experts. An interim speaker would be chosen from a list prepared by McCarthy and his staff at the beginning of the year, but staff intimately familiar with House rules say the role of that person would be to oversee a speaker election and little more.

— The House and Senate must pass appropriations bills to fund the federal government before mid-November or there will be a shutdown. Among the reasons far-right Republicans are mad at McCarthy is that he relied on Democrats to pass a temporary spending patch last weekend to keep the government open.

— McCarthy was unapologetic Tuesday about keeping the government open. “If at the end of the day I am removed from speaker because I moved to ensure that the troops and Border Patrol agents continued to receive pay, that’s a fight worth fighting for,” McCarthy said on CNBC. He addressed his conference in a closed-door meeting underneath the Capitol on Tuesday morning, saying he had no regrets about his speakership, and was interrupted several times by raucous standing ovations.

— The proceedings set to play out Tuesday have taken place only once before in the House of Representatives, in 1910. They are the culmination of a months-long power struggle between McCarthy and a group of far-right lawmakers who tried to block his ascent to the speakership in January and have tormented him ever since.

-New York Times