Republicans are once again staring down House speaker drama. Here’s what’s at stake.

House Republicans could soon experience some serious déjà vu. 

On Friday, January 3, the newly elected Congress will convene for the first time and vote for a House speaker. Like last term — when it took 15 rounds for former GOP Speaker Kevin McCarthy to be elected — this contest could well be chaotic due to Republicans’ narrow majority and conservative opposition to current Speaker Mike Johnson, who is again his party’s candidate for the job. 

At stake is Republicans’ ability to get pretty much anything done in the near term. The House isn’t able to function without a speaker, which means that key tasks, like certifying the presidential election on January 6, are at risk of being delayed. Any speaker drama also sends a pointed message about the enduring divides within the party and how they could pose a real challenge when it comes to the GOP’s attempts to pass actual policies in the coming year. 

Republicans have a 219-215 majority — one member less than expected since former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) has said he won’t be returning — so Johnson can only afford to lose one GOP member if all Democrats vote against him, as they’re likely to do. (A candidate must win a majority of all votes to secure the job, so if all 434 members vote for a speaker option, Johnson will need 218 votes to win. If some members vote “present,” that math becomes more convoluted.)

Already, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) has said he won’t be backing Johnson, and others, like Reps. Chip Roy (R-TX), Andy Harris (R-MD), and Scott Perry (R-PA), have refrained from committing their votes. 

Johnson has been scrambling to lock up the support he needs in recent weeks, including securing President-elect Donald Trump’s endorsement on Monday, as well as the backing of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who’s taken to weighing in on congressional infighting. It’s not yet clear, however, if that backing will be sufficient to win over his skeptics, who are angry about Johnson’s reliance on Democratic votes to approve funding bills and frustrated about the lack of transparency from leadership on major pieces of legislation. 

The House needs a speaker to function

Any speaker chaos effectively impedes the basic functions of the House. 

As laid out by a 1789 law, a speaker is required for everything from swearing in members to organizing committees to passing new legislation. The speaker election — which takes place via a public roll call vote — ultimately needs to happen prior to any other congressional business. 

The January 2023 fight over McCarthy’s election offered a preview of the potential consequences: As the voting process stretched to multiple days, members grew concerned about their inability to provide constituent services and to receive classified briefings, since they hadn’t technically been sworn in yet. 

Unlike in 2023, however, there are also considerations beyond the day-to-day work of Congress this term. The speaker role likely needs to be filled for the House to certify the presidential election results on Monday, and a failure to do so could delay the certification of Trump’s victory. As CNN reported Thursday, Johnson’s allies have cited this concern as a reason for his detractors to stand down. 

If the House fails to elect a speaker by January 6, lawmakers could try to push the certification date to later in the month or test other unprecedented alternatives, like electing a temporary speaker, to clear this procedural hurdle. It’s not certain, however, that the House parliamentarian, a nonpartisan official who advises Congress on interpreting the rules, would go along with such workarounds, according to George Washington University professor Sarah Binder, an expert on congressional rules. 

Binder notes that there are ways the House could utilize a temporary speaker to conduct urgent business but that the parliamentarian might advise against doing so. If they did, lawmakers would likely abide by this judgment since the parliamentarian’s decisions have typically held significant weight. (The parliamentarian’s advice isn’t binding, and lawmakers have ignored it in the past, but these instances have been rare.)

Possible chaos is a preview of Republican divides — and the fights to come

Any speaker fight also signals just how deep Republican divides continue to go and how chaotic efforts to advance their policies are poised to be. It also shows the power of the party’s right flank, which twice held the speaker’s contest hostage in 2023 in order to make demands about coveted positions on committees and the power to depose House leadership. 

“It’s a reflection of the underlying disagreements and factionalism within the House Republican Conference,” Binder told Vox. “Whether we date them to Donald Trump, whether we date it to MAGA, whether we date it to the Tea Party [movement in 2009] or beyond … [or] activist conservatives versus the establishment, the Republican Party has long been wrought by this central faction.”

McCarthy’s contentious election — and governance — last term provided a vivid preview of these fault lines. In January 2023, it took multiple rounds of voting across four days — resolving early in the morning on January 7 — before McCarthy was elected speaker, thanks to conservative opposition to his leadership. To win the speaker’s gavel, McCarthy eventually offered significant concessions to far-right members, including seats on the Rules Committee and the ability for any Republican member to unilaterally force a vote on the removal of the speaker. 

The party’s right flank eventually succeeded in toppling McCarthy from the speakership in October 2023, igniting another round of fighting over the position. It then took more than three weeks for Republicans to fill the position again, with multiple nominations and multiple floor votes prior to Johnson’s elevation. 

It was McCarthy’s decision to work with Democrats to pass a short-term funding measure that precipitated his ouster, and on multiple occasions since then, Johnson has also had to rely on Democratic votes to keep the government open and to pass major foreign aid packages because his own conference was simply too fractured to agree on them.

These splits, coupled with narrow margins in the House — which will get even narrower soon, as two Republican House members join the Trump administration — are set to be tested again and again in 2025. The speaker’s race will be Republicans’ first hurdle, but any GOP efforts to pursue ambitious immigration and tax bills during Trump’s administration, or even to keep the government open, could prove fraught.

“The stakes are higher for them [now],” says Binder, “because they’ve got Trump in the White House, and they have a policy agenda.”