House Republicans — after some initial drama — successfully reelected Rep. Mike Johnson as speaker on Friday.
House Republicans’ speaker drama, briefly explained
Initial GOP defections point to the party’s divides.
Li Zhou is a former politics reporter at Vox, where she covers Congress and elections. Previously, she was a tech policy reporter at Politico and an editorial fellow at the Atlantic.
Johnson’s victory in the first round of voting came as something of a surprise, after three Republicans initially voted against him, depriving him of the 218-person majority he needed to win the speakership. After conferring with Johnson, however, Reps. Ralph Norman of South Carolina and Keith Self of Texas flipped their votes in favor of his candidacy, and Johnson secured the job.
Every Democrat — 215 total — voted for Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), while the lone Republican holdout, Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, voted for Rep. Tom Emmer (R-MN).
The tight vote and its last-minute resolution are both indicative of the challenges that House Republicans will continue to face this term given their narrow majority, and their hard-right flank’s penchant for casting disruptive votes. Johnson’s difficulties were initially reminiscent of the House GOP’s struggles in 2023, when it took 15 rounds of voting for former GOP Speaker Kevin McCarthy to be elected after ultra-conservative Republicans rebelled.
At stake in the speakers’ race was Republicans’ ability to get pretty much anything done in the near term. The House isn’t able to function without a speaker, which meant that key tasks, like certifying the presidential election on January 6, were at risk of being delayed. The narrow and short-lived Republican revolt also sent a pointed message about the enduring divides within the party and how they could pose a real obstacle when it comes to the GOP’s attempts to pass actual policies in the coming year.
The House needs a speaker to function
Any speaker chaos would have impeded the basic functions of the House.
As laid out by a 1789 law, a speaker is required for everything from swearing in members to organizing committees to passing new legislation. The speaker election — which takes place via a public roll call vote — ultimately needed to happen prior to any other congressional business.
The January 2023 fight over McCarthy’s election offered a preview of the potential consequences: As the voting process stretched to multiple days, members grew concerned about their inability to provide constituent services and to receive classified briefings, since they hadn’t technically been sworn in yet.
Unlike in 2023, however, there were considerations beyond the day-to-day work of Congress this term. The speaker role likely needed to be filled for the House to certify the presidential election results on Monday, and a failure to do so could have delayed the certification of Trump’s victory. As CNN reported Thursday, Johnson’s allies cited this concern as a reason for his detractors to stand down.
If the House failed to elect a speaker by January 6, lawmakers could have tried to push the certification date to later in the month or tested other unprecedented alternatives, like electing a temporary speaker, to clear this procedural hurdle. It’s not certain, however, that the House parliamentarian, a nonpartisan official who advises Congress on interpreting the rules, would have gone along with such workarounds, according to George Washington University professor Sarah Binder, an expert on congressional rules.
Binder notes that there are ways the House could have utilized a temporary speaker to conduct urgent business but that the parliamentarian might have advised against doing so. If they did, lawmakers would likely have abided by this judgment since the parliamentarian’s decisions have typically held significant weight. (The parliamentarian’s advice isn’t binding, and lawmakers have ignored it in the past, but these instances have been rare.)
Friday’s chaos was a preview of Republican divides — and the fights to come
The early rumblings of GOP dissent on Friday signaled just how deep Republican divides go, and how chaotic efforts to advance their policies are poised to be. It shows, too, the power of the party’s right flank, which twice held the speaker’s contest hostage in 2023 in order to make demands about coveted positions on committees and the power to depose House leadership.
“It’s a reflection of the underlying disagreements and factionalism within the House Republican Conference,” Binder told Vox. “Whether we date them to Donald Trump, whether we date it to MAGA, whether we date it to the Tea Party [movement in 2009] or beyond … [or] activist conservatives versus the establishment, the Republican Party has long been wrought by this central faction.”
McCarthy’s contentious election — and governance — last term provided a vivid preview of these fault lines. In January 2023, it took multiple rounds of voting across four days — resolving early in the morning on January 7 — before McCarthy was elected speaker, thanks to conservative opposition to his leadership. To win the speaker’s gavel, McCarthy eventually offered significant concessions to far-right members, including seats on the Rules Committee and the ability for any Republican member to unilaterally force a vote on the removal of the speaker.
Conservatives eventually succeeded in toppling McCarthy from the speakership in October 2023, igniting another round of fighting over the position. It then took more than three weeks for Republicans to fill the position again, with multiple nominations and multiple floor votes prior to Johnson’s elevation.
McCarthy’s decision to work with Democrats to pass a short-term funding measure precipitated his ouster, and on multiple occasions since then, Johnson has also had to rely on Democratic votes to keep the government open and to pass major foreign aid packages because his own conference was simply too fractured to agree on them.
These splits, coupled with narrow margins in the House — which will get even narrower soon, as two Republican House members join the Trump administration — are set to be tested again and again in 2025. The speaker’s race was Republicans’ first hurdle, but any GOP efforts to pursue ambitious immigration and tax bills during Trump’s administration, or even to keep the government open, could prove fraught.
“The stakes are higher for them [now],” Binder says, “because they’ve got Trump in the White House, and they have a policy agenda.”
Update, January 3, 2:30 pm ET: This story was originally published on January 2 and has been updated with the results from the House speaker vote
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