Nancy Mace was called out for trying to fundraise off voting to vacate the House speaker, despite previously criticizing colleagues for doing the same.
Mace was one of eight Republicans who voted to oust Kevin McCarthy as speaker and throw the House in disarray. Since then, she has tried aggressively to fundraise off her vote. She even asked for campaign donations while doing an interview inside the Capitol—a violation of House rules.
CNN host Kaitlan Collins called Mace out on the fundraising during a Wednesday night interview. Collins played an interview clip of Mace from January, during the seemingly interminable rounds of votes for speaker that McCarthy ultimately won.
“Matt Gaetz is a fraud. Every time he voted against Kevin McCarthy last week, he sent out a fundraising email,” Mace said in the interview. “What you saw last week was a constitutional process diminished by those kinds of political actions.”
When Collins asked Mace to explain her shifting stance, the congresswoman had no good response. Instead, she cast herself as a victim.
Mace said that unlike Gaetz, she has not been fundraising off the vote “every step of the way.”
“I made the decision to fundraise over the last 24 hours because of the threats that I have received over fundraising and money drying up,” she said. “The establishment is coming after me.”
This kind of a flip-flop is typical for Mace, who will often say one thing and then vote in the completely opposite direction. In July, she said it was an “asshole move” to use the defense budget to bar the Pentagon from reimbursing service members who travel for abortions. Just hours later, she voted to include that amendment in the budget bill.
As Collins pointed out, Mace also joined Steve Bannon’s podcast on Wednesday, despite voting in 2021 to hold him in contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with a subpoena from the January 6 committee. This is not the first time she has joined as a guest on the podcast.