House votes for rules to make ousting a speaker more difficult

The House of Representatives has adopted new rules that would make it harder to trigger a vote to oust a speaker.

House lawmakers voted 215-209 along party lines to set the chamber’s rules for the 119th Congress. 

Among them was a measure to raise the threshold for calling a “motion to vacate the chair” – which sets off a House-wide vote to depose the sitting speaker. 

Ex-Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., agreed to lower the threshold to just one person in order to win over holdouts and clinch the speaker’s gavel in January 2023, at the start of the 118th Congress.

But the 119th Congress is now raising that number from one to nine – and amending the rule further, to specify that nine members of the sitting majority party must be the ones to call for a vote.

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Speaker Mike Johnson led the House in making it harder to oust him from the top job. (Getty)

It sparked fury among Democrats, who accused Republicans of eroding the significance of the minority party.

“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,” said Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., the top Democrat on the House Rules Committee. 

“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.”

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Former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy was ousted after agreeing to lower the threshold for a motion to vacate the chair. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

McCarthy was notably ousted by eight House Republicans and all House Democrats after former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., called for a motion to vacate the chair in October 2023.

The one-vote threshold hung over Johnson like the sword of Damocles for over a year after he won the speaker’s gavel later that same month.

The change is the product of negotiations between the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus and the more pragmatic Republican Main Street Caucus.

Other changes in the new House Republican rules package include substituting some non-gendered family language like “child” and “parent” to more gendered language like son, daughter, mother, and father.

Former Rep. Matt Gaetz led McCarthy’s ouster (AP/J. Scott Applewhite)

It also limits the House Speaker’s ability to bypass traditional chamber processes to rush a bill to the House floor via a mechanism known as “suspension of the rules.”

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Johnson’s use of the suspension measure to pass critical legislation with Democratic support angered GOP hardliners in the House GOP Conference.

Under the new package, Johnson will only be able to put a House bill up for a vote under suspension on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays.