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Republicans are expected to change House rules and make it harder to impeach a speaker the Housejust a year after a single GOP lawmaker initiated the first-ever impeachment of a member of office.
Former MP Kevin McCarthy was elected Speaker of the House in January 2023, but was not elected on the first ballot. It took lawmakers four days and 15 votes to finally find consensus and back McCarthy for the position, but the infighting didn’t stop there.
Currently, House rules allow a lawmaker to have the ability to introduce a motion to remove the Speaker and initiate a floor vote. So when former Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz introduced a motion to oust McCarthy from the top House post, a vote was initiated and sufficient support resulted in his ouster.
Current Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, left, and former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy. (Getty Images)
However, House Republicans they are trying to change that rule and make it more difficult to evict the House’s top office in the future.
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McCarthy’s ouster led to the room be without an official speaker for two months in 2023, which raises the question of whether a single lawmaker should be given the ability to introduce such a motion.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson listens during a news conference after the Republican Conference meeting at the U.S. Capitol on January 17, 2024 in Washington, DC (Kent Nishimura)
Under the new package of proposed House rules released Wednesday, Republicans are trying to change the rules to require a lawmaker to get eight co-sponsors to file a motion to leave the presidency.
Under the rule, a member and their co-sponsors must be part of the “majority party,” meaning only Republicans, who currently hold the majority, have the power to file a vacancy motion for the next two years.
Former MP Kevin McCarthy was removed as Speaker on 4 October 2023. (Valerie Plesch/Getty Images)
The rule was rejected by Democratic Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., who said the proposed changes would “shield the president from accountability in the entire chamber.”
“The American people did not vote for this, and you better believe that the Democrats are not going to let the Republicans turn the House of Representatives into a rubber stamp for their extremist policies,” McGovern said, according to axes
Rep. Jim McGovern said the proposed changes would “shield the president from accountability in the entire chamber,” Axios reported. (Tom Williams)
The proposed rules package will be voted on once a speaker is chosen and the 119th Congress is handed over. The vote for the first speaker will take place this Friday.
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The current Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson is seeking re-election to the position. There is currently one GOP member, Rep. Thomas Massie, who said he would not vote for Johnson. However, the speaker recently received a big endorsement from President-elect Donald Trump.
