The only way Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy will keep his job next week is if he works for and with Democrats, a representative from Florida, Matt Gaetz, is promising. 

Mr. McCarthy’s handling of the spending bills — in one the most turbulent weeks in his tenure so far — demonstrates that he is untrustworthy, Mr. Gaetz, a Republican, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday morning. Mr. Gaetz says he will file a motion to vacate this week, in an attempt to oust Mr. McCarthy from his position as Speaker. 

“So be it, bring it on, let’s get over with it and let’s start governing,” Mr. McCarthy responded on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” after Mr. Gaetz’s announcement. The attempts to oust the Speaker are “nothing new,” the speaker says. “He’s tried to do that from the moment I ran for office.” 

“I’ll survive. This is personal with Matt,” Mr. McCarthy said, adding that Mr. Gaetz is “more interested in securing TV interviews than doing something.”

If the motion to vacate is successful, Mr. McCarthy would be the first Speaker in history to be vacated, raising questions about how the House would proceed and who would take Mr. McCarthy’s place until a new Speaker is elected.

“We need to rip off the Band-Aid, we need to move on with new leadership that can be trustworthy,” Mr. Gaetz told CNN. “The one thing everybody has in common is that nobody trusts Kevin McCarthy,” adding that the speaker “lied to Biden” and “he lied to House conservatives.”

Mr. Gaetz’s announcement comes the morning after Mr. McCarthy managed to pass a spending bill with support of Democrats, despite Republican dissenters. The bill, passed hours before a midnight deadline, averted a government shutdown by funding the government until November 17. 

“Speaker McCarthy made an agreement with House conservatives in January and since then he’s been in brazen, repeated material breach of that agreement,” Mr. Gaetz said Sunday. “This agreement that he made with Democrats to really blow past a lot of the spending guardrails we set up is a last straw.”

Mr. Gaetz, a long-time opponent of Mr. McCarthy, is following-through on weeks of promising that passing a stopgap spending bill would be an “automatic trigger” in efforts to force Mr. McCarthy out of his position. 

Much of the controversy around the spending bill centered on aid to Ukraine, which an increasing number of Republican members of Congress oppose. Mr. McCarthy was “baiting Republicans,” Mr. Gaetz said, while making “a secret deal with Democrats on Ukraine.” 

Once introduced, the House would have 48 hours to vote on the motion to vacate. A simple majority is required to pass the measure. 

It’s unclear whether Mr. Gaetz will have the required votes to remove the Speaker, but he says he has “enough” votes so that by next week “if Kevin McCarthy is still the Speaker of the House he will be serving at the pleasure of the Democrats,” Mr. Gaetz says.

“The only way Kevin McCarthy is Speaker of the House at the end of this coming week is if democrats bail him out,” Mr. Gaetz said.