House Republicans met privately Wednesday and picked Steve Scalise, R-La., over Jim Jordan, R-Ohio., as the GOP nominee to be the next speaker, more than a week after Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., was ousted from the chamber’s top job.
Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., has been acting as speaker pro tempore since the House voted to remove McCarthy.
Next, the full House will vote on who the next speaker will be.
Here is how it will go:
Republicans voted behind closed doors
According to GOP rules, the vote was done by secret ballot, and the winning candidate needed to secure a majority of GOP votes, in this case 111 of 221 House Republicans. Scalise won the Republican nomination to be speaker, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said as he left the room. The vote was 113-99, Issa said.
Reps. Chip Roy of Texas and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania had proposed a rules change that would temporarily have required a Republican candidate to get 217 votes of the 221 GOP members to be considered the party’s nominee.
Rep. Steve Womack, R-Ark., confirmed to reporters Wednesday that he offered a motion to table or kill the proposed rules change. The motion was successful, said Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., and the proposed rules change was voted down.
Democrats renominated Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries
House Democrats unanimously renominated Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., in a closed-door meeting Tuesday night. During the speaker election in January, Jeffries won every single Democratic vote on all 15 ballots.
Next, the full House will vote
The earliest the full House could have a floor vote would be 3 p.m. That’s because the House adjourned Tuesday until that time.
There is no required waiting period. Because Republicans have now emerged with a candidate, McHenry can bring the vote up on the floor. In the past when a speaker died in office or resigned, the House usually moved directly to electing a new speaker.
There would first be nominating speeches for the candidates, typically offered by their close allies.
The vote itself would be done “viva voce” — meaning members stand when their names are called by a reading clerk and verbally announce whom they are supporting. Members can vote for anyone (even people who are not members of the House), vote present or not vote at all.
The math to win the speaker’s gavel
To win the gavel, a candidate needs support from a majority of the House members present, meaning the eventual speaker will need 217 votes if every one of the current members votes and does so for a candidate by name. There are 433 members, with two vacancies, so a majority is 217.
If members are absent or if some vote present instead of supporting a candidate, that decreases what the majority vote needs to be. The House is intended to have a total membership of 435, so a majority is usually 218.
Seven speaker candidates have won without 218 votes since 1913, when the size of the House increased to 435; those winners, who all came within a few votes of the magic number, include John Boehner in 2015, Nancy Pelosi in 2021 and McCarthy in January, according to the Congressional Research Service.
If no candidate can win a majority, the House will continue to hold votes until one does. That has happened only 15 times in the chamber’s history, 13 of them before the Civil War. The most recent example was McCarthy’s drawn-out floor fight that went 15 ballots.
In 1855-56, it took 133 ballots over two months to elect the speaker. In 1923, it took nine ballots after a group of progressive Republicans refused to support the party’s nominee, Frederick Gillett, until certain rules changes were made.
Twice , the House voted to change the rules and elect the speaker by pluralities instead of majorities — in 1849 and 1856 — both times because members feared they would never be able to elect a speaker by majority vote.
When elections have taken multiple ballots, the House has held only a few votes each day. If that happens again, it could adjourn after three or four unsuccessful votes, which would give party leaders time to whip members outside the chamber and try to strike deals.
How often do speaker elections take place other than in January?
While there is always a speaker election at the start of a new session of Congress in January, it is much rarer for there to be an election while a session is already underway. Since 1913, there have been five such instances because speakers died or resigned.
The most recent example was in 2015, when Boehner resigned.
