How America’s House of Representatives will choose a speaker

Editor’s note (October 16th 2023): This article was updated after Jim Jordan won the Republican nomination for the House speakership.

AMERICA’S HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES has been without a permanent speaker since October 3rd, when a handful of Republican rebels ousted Kevin McCarthy. On October 13th a majority of Republicans picked Jim Jordan, a right-wing firebrand, as their choice to fill the role. It was the party’s second such vote in four days: Mr Jordan lost the first, on October 11th, to Steve Scalise, the House majority leader. To win the speakership a candidate needs a majority in the full House, or 217 votes. Republicans have a slim majority—221 seats to Democrats’ 212—meaning that even a few holdouts could derail the election. Mr Scalise failed to rally his party around him, and dropped out of the race. Now Mr Jordan hopes to avoid the same fate. How will the impasse be resolved?

Mr McCarthy’s sacking was unprecedented: the House had never before voted to remove its speaker. On October 2nd Matt Gaetz, a fellow Republican, filed a “motion to vacate” which triggered a vote of confidence in Mr McCarthy. Previous Republican speakers threatened with a similar fate had jumped before they were pushed. In 2015 John Boehner resigned after being threatened with such a motion. (Thomas Massie, its co-author, has a framed copy in his office.) Newt Gingrich, who oversaw the party’s return to power in the House in 1994, stepped down four years later after taking the blame for midterm-election losses.

In both those cases the party swiftly coalesced around a successor. This time, clearly, that has not happened. To be elected speaker any nominee needs to command a majority in the House, which means securing 217 votes. The Republican caucus was divided in both votes so far. In the first, 113 members backed Mr Scalise and 99 opted for Mr Jordan, a founder of the House Freedom Caucus, an ultra-right-wing group that has bedevilled the Republican leadership since its formation in 2015. In the second, Mr Jordan won 124 votes; 81 went to Austin Scott, a low-profile, mainstream conservative from Georgia.

Many members were worried that a split decision behind closed doors would lead to public humiliation for the party when the speakership was voted on in the full House. In January it took 15 excruciating rounds of voting to install Mr McCarthy. During the candidate forum, two members, Chip Roy and Brian Fitzpatrick, tabled an amendment to the rules that would have required the winning candidate to secure 217 votes to be selected as the party’s nominee. Mr Scalise, who did not yet have those votes, successfully whipped against it.

After Mr Jordan won the nomination, he held a second poll to gauge his support: just 152 said they would back him. On October 16th, however, his prospects seemed to improve, as some holdouts said they would come to his side. He appears to be pressing ahead with a full House floor vote, which is scheduled for October 17th.

It remains unclear whether the fresh support will be enough. Others still vehemently oppose him. “If you reward bad behaviour, you’re going to get more of it,” said Don Bacon, a representative from Nebraska who backed Mr Scalise. According to Axios, at one point, a small number of Democrats and Republicans were discussing the possibility of a candidate with bipartisan support.

Replacing the speaker is an urgent matter. For now Patrick McHenry, a Republican from North Carolina, is acting speaker. His powers, as yet untested, appear to be extremely limited. Under a stopgap deal struck on September 30th to prevent a government shutdown, the House needs to pass a spending package by November 17th. It is not clear that that falls within Mr McHenry’s remit. And in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel, the House will be unable to approve new funding for America’s ally in the longer term. Lawmakers are frustrated. Mike Lawler, a Republican congressman from New York, has called the situation “an unmitigated shitshow”.  ■

Correction (October 10th): The speaker needs to secure 217 votes, not 218 as we wrote in an earlier version. Sorry.