House Republicans Move to Make it Harder to Remove Speaker

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The change would bolster the speaker’s defense against future unseating attempts.

A proposed set of rules governing House operations for the 119th Congress includes a notable change that would strengthen the speaker’s position against future ousting attempts.

The chamber’s current rules allow just one member of either party to force a vote to vacate the speaker. The new package, released on Jan. 1, would up that threshold by requiring the resolution to be brought by at least nine members of the majority party.

Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) decried the change on social media and accused his Republican colleagues of “injecting partisan extremism” into the House rules.

“Their proposed changes would, for the first time in history, shield the Speaker from accountability to the entire chamber by making it so that only Republicans can move to vacate the chair. This makes it clear that they have no intention of working together to find common ground,” McGovern wrote on X.

Traditionally, House rules have allowed for one member of either party to make a motion to vacate the chair by raising a “question of privilege,” which forces a vote on the matter within two legislative days. In 2019, under Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the bar was raised to require that such a motion be brought by a majority of either party.

The current rules were adopted in January 2023 as part of a deal former Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) struck with holdout Republicans to secure the speakership. That concession cost him the role nine months later. Former Rep. Matt Gaetz led a successful charge to oust the California Republican, launching the House into weeks of turmoil that culminated in the elevation of current Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.).

Johnson faced a similar challenge led by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) last May. In that case, House Democrats joined with most of the Republican conference to table Greene’s resolution. But according to Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), there will be no reprise of that collaboration during the speaker election on Jan. 3.

Johnson has been critical of the “motion to vacate” rule as it currently stands, holding that it has harmed both the speaker’s office and the Republican majority. He nonetheless decided against trying to change the rule last year, finding opposition to the idea to be too strong.

The new proposal follows GOP negotiations that took place in November between members of the hardline House Freedom Caucus, which negotiated the initial rule change with McCarthy, and the more moderate Main Street Caucus.

“We’ve been able to work across the conference to eliminate the controversial issues that could have divided us and move forward together to deliver on the president’s agenda,” Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), chairman of the Freedom Caucus, said at a Nov. 13 press conference.

Other provisions of the 36-page rule package would formally dissolve the House’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion, rename the Office of Congressional Ethics to the Office of Congressional Conduct, and redesignate the House Oversight and Accountability Committee as the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

One more noteworthy inclusion embedded within the bill is a provision that would require immediate consideration of, among other measures, legislation to impose sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC) for “any effort to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute any protected person of the United States and its allies.”

The bill is an apparent response to the international court’s issuance of arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant. Neither Israel nor the United States is a member of the ICC, though the court has jurisdiction over war crimes committed in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.

The House voted in June to sanction the ICC over the warrant for Netanyahu’s arrest, but the bill stalled in the Senate amid Democrat opposition. With Republicans set to control the upper chamber, such delays will likely not materialize going forward.

Not all House Republicans agree to address the ICC’s stance in the rule package.

“The United States is a sovereign country, so I don’t assign any credibility to decisions of the International Criminal Court. But how did a bill to protect Netanyahu make it into the House rules package to be voted on immediately after the Speaker vote? Where are our priorities?!” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) wrote on X.

Massie’s comments follow his announcement that he will not support Johnson in the speakership election. Meanwhile, Reps. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) and Chip Roy (R-Texas) have signaled that they are still on the fence.

Johnson can only afford to lose one Republican vote if he is to keep his grip on the gavel.

Once the speaker is chosen, members will vote on the rules package. Given the lengths to which the last two elections were drawn out, there’s no telling when exactly that will be.