I’m surprised that a former Member of Congress–Steve Israel, in a piece in The New Republic–has made the same mistake that a journalist did, as I explained in a previous ELB post.
The mistake is to think that Mike Johnson, as the current Speaker of the House, will have the power as Speaker to prevent the Democrats from becoming the majority party in the House after next year’s midterms if the Democrats are certified by state officials to have won enough seats to be in the majority on January 3, 2027.
Israel writes: “the final arbiter of [House] elections is the speaker of the House” and cites the example of the “Bloody Eighth” involving a 1984 election to a House seat from Indiana (about which I write in Ballot Battles). But this is true only after the House has organized itself and elected a new Speaker at the beginning of the new Congress. If the issue is which party is the majority at the beginning of the new Congress with the power to elect the new Speaker, then there isn’t a Speaker to control who gets seated from any specific disputed district.
Johnson won’t be Speaker at the beginning of the new Congress, unless and until he’s reelected Speaker based on a new majority as a result of the midterms. His current Speakership ends with the end of the current Congress. The key point is that the House is not a continuing body and instead must reorganize itself with each new Congress.
Israel also writes: “Do you expect [Johnson] to willingly surrender the gavel because it’s the right thing to do, when Trump and the entire Republican Party threaten his political future?” But this rhetorical question is based on a false premise. Johnson won’t have any gavel to surrender at the beginning of the new Congress on January 3, 2027. There won’t be any Speaker at all, either Democrat or Republican, until there is a new Speakership election based on all the Members-elect who present to the Clerk of the House their credentials of election from their states.
As I wrote on my previous blog post on this point, there is much to be concerned about regarding next year’s midterms, including what might go wrong on January 3, 2027, as the House attempts to organize itself. (As I suggested there, the two relevant previous episodes to consider are those that occurred after the 1838 and 1862 House elections, which I also wrote about in Ballot Battles, and not the Bloody Eighth from the 1984 elections). But the specific scenario that former Representative Israel depicts is not accurate, can’t occur given that the House is not a continuing body, and thus should not be the focus of concern.
