Speaker of The United States House of Representatives - Selection

Selection

The House of Representatives elects the speaker of the house on the first day of every new Congress. Each party nominates a candidate. There is usually some degree of consensus within each party's leadership as to who the favored candidate will be. Whoever receives a simple majority of the votes is elected. The new Speaker is then sworn in by the Dean of the House, the chamber's longest-serving member.

In modern practice, the Speaker is chosen by the majority party from among its senior leaders, either when a vacancy in the office arrives, or when the majority party changes. It is usually obvious within two or three weeks of a House election who the new Speaker will be. Previous Speakers have been minority leaders (when the majority party changes, as they are already the House party leader, and as the minority leader is usually their party's nominee for speaker), or majority leaders (upon departure of the current speaker in the majority party), assuming that the party leadership hierarchy is followed. In the past, other potent candidates have included chairmen of influential standing committees.

So far the Democrats have always elevated their minority leader to the speakership upon reclaiming majority control of the House, however Republicans have not always followed this leadership succession pattern. In 1919, for instance, Republicans bypassed James R. Mann, R-IL, who had been minority leader for eight years, and elected Frederick Gillett, R-MA, to be Speaker. Mann "had angered many Republicans by objecting to their private bills on the floor;" also he was a protégé of autocratic Speaker Joseph Cannon, R-IL (1903–1911), and many Members "suspected that he would try to re-centralize power in his hands if elected Speaker." More recently, although Robert H. Michel was the Minority Leader in 1994 when the Republicans regained control of the House in the 1994 midterm elections, he had already announced his retirement and had little or no involvement in the campaign, including the Contract with America, which was unveiled six weeks before voting day. Michel opted not to seek re-election because he had been isolated in the caucus by Minority Whip Newt Gingrich and other younger and more aggressive congressmen; so it would have been unlikely that Michel could have retained a House leadership post in the succeeding session of Congress.

It is expected that members of the House vote for their party's candidate. If they do not do so, they usually vote for someone else in their party or vote "present". Those who vote for the other party's candidate often face serious consequences, up to and including the loss of seniority. The last major instance where a representative voted for the other party's candidate was in 2000, when Democrat Jim Traficant of Ohio voted for Republican Dennis Hastert. In response, the Democrats stripped him of his seniority and he lost all of his committee posts.

If the Speaker's party loses control of the House in an election, and if the Speaker and Majority Leader both remain in the leadership hierarchy, that would mean that they would become the Minority Leader and Minority Whip, respectively. As the minority party has one less leadership position after losing the speaker's chair, there may be a contest for the remaining leadership positions. Most Speakers whose party has lost control of the House had not returned to the party leadership (Tom Foley lost his seat, Dennis Hastert returned to the backbenches and resigned from the House in late 2007). However, Speakers Joseph William Martin, Jr. and Sam Rayburn did seek the Minority Leader post to retain the House party leadership, as their parties swapped control of the House in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Nancy Pelosi is the most recent example of an outgoing Speaker who was elected Minority Leader, after the Democrats lost control of the House in the 2010 elections.