House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who came to the helm of the U.S. House of Representatives last week, says he’s open to changing a rule allowing a single member to make an effort to vacate the speaker’s chair.
A motion to vacate allows the House, when it loses confidence in its elected leader, to remove the speaker from their position. Until this month, no speaker in U.S. history had ever been successfully removed through the mechanism.
That changed on Oct. 3 when, after months of threatening to do so, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) brought a motion to vacate to the House floor against then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). All House Democrats joined Mr. Gaetz, Reps. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), Ken Buck (R-Colo.), Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), Eli Crane (R-Ariz.), Bob Good (R-Va.), Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), and Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.) in the motion to vacate.
With the passage of the motion to vacate, Mr. McCarthy became the first person in history to be removed from the top job in the lower chamber by a vote of the House.
Following Mr. McCarthy’s ouster, the House descended into 22 days of paralysis as Republicans tried to find a replacement that could win enough support. After three unsuccessful candidacies, they decided on Mr. Johnson, who managed to win unanimous support among Republicans during the vote on the House floor.
But questions remain about the eventual fate of the House’s motion to vacate rule, which has changed substantially on several occasions in recent years.
Mr. McCarthy’s fall from the top spot was due, in part, to a deal he made with the right flank of his caucus to win the speakership in January, which allowed a single member to bring a motion to vacate.
Now, with 22 days of chaos still on the minds of lawmakers, Mr. Johnson said he “isn’t afraid” to raise the threshold for a motion to vacate from its current one-member requirement.
“Everyone’s here in good faith,“ Mr. Johnson said during an Oct. 29 appearance on Fox News’s ”Sunday Morning Futures.”
“Everyone has told me that that rule has to change. Look, I’m not afraid of it because I’m going to openly work transparently and work with every member, and everyone ... will fully understand what we’re doing and why,” he added. “And I think that’s a big part of it.”
Once, the motion to vacate required only a single member. However, under former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) the threshold for that was significantly raised.
But Mr. McCarthy’s candidacy for speaker left him with no choice but to lower the threshold back to one member in order to win the support to take the gavel, which he won by extremely thin margins on the 15th ballot—marking the longest speaker contest since the 19th century.
But throughout his 269 days as speaker, Mr. McCarthy continually faced the specter of the motion to vacate, leading him to desperately try negotiating with Mr. Gaetz and other opponents. That face-off ended with Mr. McCarthy’s decision to bring a stopgap spending bill to the floor, which passed with mostly Democrat support and no concessions for Republicans.
Mr. Johnson said that this can’t be the norm moving forward.
“The rule makes it difficult for any Speaker to do their job,” he said.
Nevertheless, he said, changing the rule isn’t the most important thing for him as he takes up the mantle of speaker. He emphasized he still wants to reduce the power of the speaker—now his own power.
“My highest priority is to get this work done and to do it in an open and transparent way into, as I said in my speech, the night when I took the oath, to decentralize the power from the Speaker’s office.”
This, he said, would make the motion to vacate less of a concern.
“I really want to empower our chairman and the committees of jurisdiction and all the talented people in the House and make them more of a part of the big decisions and the situations and the processes here and ensure regular order,” Johnson said.
He added, “If we do that, we don’t have to worry about a motion to vacate, and I’m doing that, working on that every day.”
All eyes in Washington are on Mr. Johnson, who now is steering a caucus that remains deeply divided after three weeks of intense intra-party conflict between centrists and conservatives.
Until now, Mr. Johnson has been a relative unknown in Washington, and it’s still unclear what his tenure will look like.
The House is set to return this week to continue work on funding for the government, which is set to run out in the middle of November.
