House Rules for Next Congress Make It Harder to Toss Speaker

WASHINGTON — House Republican leaders formally unveiled the rules they’ve drafted for the 119th Congress on Wednesday, the highlight of which is a provision that should make it harder for members to oust a speaker.

Thanks to a razor-thin majority and personal animus, the Republican-controlled House was thrown into chaos in the fall of 2023 when then-Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., made a motion to oust then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif.

At the time — and to this day — the motion to vacate rule enabled a single member to initiate a vote on the House floor.

Gaetz succeeded in ousting McCarthy, but it took the House more than three weeks to finally elect current Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., to the post.

Since then disaffected members of Congress, most notably Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., have threatened to oust Johnson using the same mechanism.

Though these efforts have fizzled, the rules set out by the Republican leaders will strengthen the speaker’s hand — and provide a bit more sense of job security — by requiring a total of nine sponsors to commit to a motion to vacate before it will be taken up on the House floor.

“A resolution causing a vacancy in the Office of the Speaker shall not be privileged except if it is offered by a member of the majority party and has accumulated eight co-sponsors from the majority party at the time it is offered,” the new rules state.

Though that’s a significant change, should nine sponsors materialize, it would still take only a simple majority vote to remove the speaker from the House vote.

The roll out of the new rules came two days ahead of Friday’s start to the new Congress.

The House still has to vote on them, but can’t do so until it elects a speaker — which remains something of a fraught situation.

In addition to making it harder to oust the speaker, the new rules include provisions that would:

• Eliminate the House Office of Diversity and Inclusion.
• Change the name of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability back to the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
• Allow committees to adopt electronic voting.
• Set the stage for votes on a dozen Republican-led bills related to everything from immigration to requiring proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections to the ability of transgender student athletes to appear in competitions.

The 36-page document also includes several provisions related to appropriations and funding, and mandatory spending reductions.

And another provision authorizes subpoenas of Attorney General Merrick Garland and other DOJ officials as part of House Republicans’ investigations into the Biden family’s finances.

While the reaction to the package, released as it was on New Year’s Day, was largely muted, it did garner a stinging rebuke from Rep. James McGovern, D-Mass., the ranking member of the House Rules Committee.

“After two years of Republican dysfunction, disorganization and disarray, you’d think Speaker Johnson and House Republicans might look at their failures and try to change course by working with Democrats to address the major problems facing our country. But you’d be wrong,” he wrote in a lengthy statement distributed by his office.

McGovern accused the House GOP leadership of “totally destroying the role of speaker of the House” by injecting “partisan extremism” into the rules.

“Their proposed changes would, for the first time in American history, shield the speaker from accountability to the entire chamber by making it so that only Republicans can move to oust the speaker,” McGovern said. 

“This makes it clear that they have no intention of working together to find common ground. Instead of electing a speaker of the House, they have decided to elect a speaker of the Republican Conference — held hostage by their most extreme members,” he continued. 

“The American people want us to work together. But the other side learned no lessons, because here they are, doubling down on their extremism with an unprecedented anti-democratic move that would fit right in at the Kremlin,” he added.

McGovern was also deeply troubled by the 12 bills included in the rules package.

“Apparently … top priorities,” he said, the bills “are also the clearest window yet into” the Republican agenda for the next two years.

“Here’s what I see: Nothing to help workers. Nothing to bring down grocery prices. Nothing to lower rent or make housing more affordable. Silent on inflation and health care costs. Next to nothing on jobs and the economy,” he said. 

“Instead, I have no doubt they’ll find time to pass tax breaks for billionaires and massive corporations at the expense of everyday Americans,” McGovern said. 

“Oh and by the way: their first 12 bills not only bypass regular order, they are all totally closed — meaning no amendments at all from Democrats or Republicans. So much for openness and transparency,” he said. “And that’s after they broke their own shameful record by running the most authoritarian Congress ever — silencing debate, breaking their own rules, shutting out voices, and blocking amendments time after time over the last two years.”

As dismayed as McGovern is, there is no guarantee there will be a vote one way or another on the rules.

At present, it appears there are at least nine no votes in Johnson’s conference, enough to at least deny him the speaker’s gavel on a first and perhaps even second ballot.

According to sources on the Hill, Johnson has been aggressively courting the holdouts, and spent New Year’s at Mar-a-Lago with President-elect Donald Trump to map out a strategy for him to hold on to the speakership.

In an interview earlier this week with News Radio 710 KEEL in his hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana, Johnson said Trump has been happy to help his cause, and wanted to take pictures and offer his endorsement over the holiday.

“So he did,” Johnson said.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump beseeched Republicans on the Hill not to “blow this great opportunity which we have been given.”

“The American people need immediate relief from all of the destructive policies of the last administration,” the president-elect said. “Speaker Mike Johnson is a good, hard working, religious man. He will do the right thing, and we will continue to win. Mike has my complete and total endorsement.”

Dan can be reached at [email protected] and @DanMcCue