Democrats have abandoned the center of American politics, ceding that ground to Republicans, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy said in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News Saturday on SiriusXM Patriot 125. McCarthy said he no longer refers to them as the Democratic Party, but as the “The New Socialist Democratic Party.”

McCarthy’s comments, laying out the leftward lurch of the Democratic Party, come in the wake of a historic vote this week on the floor of the House of Representatives in which only 18 Democrats voted in support of a measure that admonishes efforts to “Abolish ICE” and destroy the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency that handles interior immigration enforcement.

“I’ve never seen anything like this on the floor of the House,” McCarthy said. “What the resolution simply does is it honors all those who work for ICE and it simply states what they do: One, stopping the million pounds of drugs, stopping those who become human traffickers—those people who are preying on our children, two thousand of those they’ve been able to stop. And saving like 900 kids who have been put into human trafficking. And it honors the lives of those six who have been killed in the line of duty, made the ultimate sacrifice in their job. One was even murdered from a cartel in Mexico. And it has one provision in there where it denounces any talk about abolishing ICE.”

On the floor of the House, Democrats split three separate ways on the resolution which was offered by Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) and championed by McCarthy. Eighteen voted for it, 34 voted against it, and 133 Democrats voted “present”—effectively ensuring the measure’s passage because the procedure through which it was brought to the floor, a “suspension calendar,” requires two-thirds of the members voting one way or another on the resolution to support it for it to pass. Nonetheless, the fact that 167 Democrats in total either voted against supporting ICE—thereby voting to abolish ICE—or voted present, and thereby casting their lot with those in opposition, is astonishing when it comes to Congress standing with a federal law enforcement agency.

“When you come to Congress, think about all the debates,” McCarthy continued on Breitbart News Saturday. “When you go and see somebody running for Congress, you ask them different positions. Has anybody ever asked somebody when they want to come to Congress, when you go to Congress make a big argument on the floor and then make sure you vote ‘present.’ Not yes or no, but vote present? That’s what 133 of the Democrats did, and their leadership. I don’t really refer to it as the Democratic Party anymore. This has become the New Socialist Democratic Party. They wanted to abolish ICE. They put a bill in to do that and had co-sponsors. When I had this bill coming up supporting ICE, I said I would put your bill up too—they said ‘oh, we’ll vote no.’ The profiles in courage have left. Eighteen of them voted yes, 34 of them voted no, and 133 of them voted present. The most ironic part of that, by them voting present—because it was on a suspension calendar it has a two-thirds threshold to pass—it passed and moved forward because they couldn’t even take a position. That’s what’s happening with this new Socialist Party that are the Democrats.”

McCarthy, when informed that the House Democrats’ radical leftist counterpart Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) intended to block Senate consideration of the House-passed pro-ICE resolution, expressed frustration with the leftists doing whatever they can to undermine federal immigration law enforcement officials. He pointed to recent polling, too, that shows the vast overwhelming majority of Americans stand with ICE and do not support abolishing the federal agency as do leftists taking over the Democratic Party.

“Why are they going to block it?” McCarthy asked. “But on a very honest note, and this is the point I made in my speech on the floor, what do you say to all those women and men who work for ICE to protect us? What does it say when you have 133 Democrats vote present on that while you have a number of Socialist Democrats who say they want to abolish ICE? That’s not where America is at. You just saw that recent poll—a majority of Americans, Democrats, Independents, Republicans, and others, believe you need to keep it [ICE].”

The history of the “abolish ICE” battle is relatively new on the national stage, but has deep roots in the far-left of the Democratic Party that reared its head when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeated one-time potential successor to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi Rep. Joe Crowley (D-NY) in a primary in New York last month. Ocasio-Cortez’s earth-shattering victory over Crowley came in large part thanks to changing demographics in the once-predominantly-Irish now largely Hispanic district in New York City—and on the heels of her pledge to lead a charge to abolish ICE as a law enforcement agency altogether.

In the wake of her win over Crowley, other leftists in the House introduced a measure that was an “abolish ICE” bill. Reps. Mark Pocan (D-WI), Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), and Adriano Espaillat (D-NY), three of the farthest left members of the House Democratic Conference, introduced the legislation to abolish ICE and starting whipping support for their bill.

When McCarthy announced plans to bring their own bill to the floor for a vote – as part of an effort to demonstrate how radical and extreme the Democratic Party has become with the rise of people like the openly socialist Ocasio-Cortez and her comrades in Congress – Pocan, Jayapa, and Espaillat announced they would oppose their own legislation.

“So what does that mean?” McCarthy said of their failed strategy on Breitbart News Saturday. “You write a bill. You put it across the desk. You put your name on it. But then you go to your colleagues and ask them to co-sponsor, and when you’ve got an opportunity in the minority that I will bring your bill to the floor then ‘oh, no, I’m got going to vote for that.’ What does that mean? They just want to appease the far-left but are afraid of the consequences. The hypocrisy of it, I think it really shone out there what they really mean.”

Their ploy did not work. McCarthy had an ace up his sleeve in the Higgins resolution, which was pro-ICE—and included a line that specifically denounced calls to abolish ICE. He swapped the Higgins resolution out for the radical leftists’ bill, and then brought that one to the floor instead—splitting the Democratic Party in three for the whole world to watch on the floor of the House.

McCarthy explained the importance of the resolution by walking Breitbart News Saturday listeners through exactly what ICE agents do to fight MS-13 gang members, drug runners, human traffickers, and more criminals.

“You have the Border Patrol and then you have ICE, for customs and immigration,” McCarthy said. “The job that they do is a difficult job. But I want you to think for one moment, think about your community and the number of gang members that come in. We watch what happens going along the border. Not everybody coming across the border wants something good for themselves—this is where gang members come in and others. MS-13 is the most vicious, heinous gang we have ever seen. You have seen stories after stories—and you have written a lot about this—of what they would go in and how they would murder young people in these communities. ICE has stopped more than 800 of those gang members, MS-13 gang members, just in the last year. Then when you look at more than 4,000 gang members they have been able to stop, they’re putting their lives on the line when they’re doing that. For people in Congress to say—you just need to see the results of all the work ICE has done and we say thank you, and we denounce this talk about abolishing ICE. It’s not hard to take a position, you’re either for it or against it.”

Specifically, too, McCarthy noted that the resolution calls out drug traffickers that ICE targets—and honors six ICE officials who have given their lives to protect Americans from criminal illegal aliens.

“The other thing people don’t talk about it, you know the epidemic we’re having here when it comes to opioids?” McCarthy said. “More than 112 people will die today because of opioids. The new drug that’s coming across is Fentanyl. Fentanyl is so dangerous that just a little bit will kill you. The pounds and pounds of drugs that the ICE agents have stopped from coming into our communities? How can’t you stand with those ICE workers that are part of the government that is helping us? What about those six families who have lost their loved ones because they were defending us? It’s so ironic. Then these Democrats don’t even have the courage—they vote present.”

From the floor of the House, McCarthy lit up the Democrats—highlighting not only their hypocrisy, but their extremism on this matter.

WATCH MCCARTHY’S FLOOR SPEECH:

In his interview with Breitbart News Saturday, McCarthy also pointed to a nonsensical floor speech from Pelosi—his counterpart on the Democrat side—in which she amazingly and falsely said, among other things, that this debate about standing up for ICE against efforts to abolish the agency “isn’t about whether you support ICE or not.”

McCarthy also mocked Pelosi for not getting her message straight at the end of her commentary about how members should vote.

“If you watch that speech, did you watch Nancy Pelosi?” McCarthy told Breitbart News Saturday. “Nancy Pelosi gets down there and she starts talking and when she gets into her speech she goes—‘and I recommend we vote no, or you can vote present—vote however you want.’ That’s their leadership. She doesn’t even know where to go.”

In fact, upon review of the tape of Pelosi’s floor speech, the Democratic leader could not—as McCarthy correctly noted—get her message straight on how she recommended her Democrat colleagues vote on the Higgins resolution.

“I urge a no vote—“ Pelosi began saying, before changing her tune. “Or—I’m going to vote present on it, because…they’ll use it politically. Use it politically, use it politically. Vote present, or however anyone wants to vote but understand what it is.”

McCarthy is the Majority Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives. His exclusive on Breitbart News Saturday also focused on efforts to combat leftist bias by Silicon Valley against conservatives, how the House is working to fund President Trump’s planned border wall, and the efforts by the GOP to defy history and hold the majority in the House in the midterm elections.