Case Study 2 — A Failure of Regular Order: The 2023 Speaker's Race

Open American Government Project

Case Study 2 — A Failure of Regular Order: The 2023 Speaker's Race

What it was

In January 2023, the U.S. House of Representatives took 15 ballots over five days to elect Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) as Speaker. It was the most prolonged Speaker election since 1859. Nine months later, in October 2023, McCarthy became the first Speaker in American history to be removed by a successful motion to vacate the chair, leaving the House without a Speaker for three weeks. Over those three weeks, the House — paralyzed without a presiding officer — held three failed Speaker votes for Steve Scalise (R-LA, withdrew), Jim Jordan (R-OH, lost three ballots), and Tom Emmer (R-MN, withdrew within hours). Mike Johnson (R-LA), a relatively low-profile fourth-tier member of leadership, was finally elected on October 25, 2023.

The 2023 House Speakership saga is one of the most vivid recent illustrations of contemporary congressional dysfunction. It is also more than a single-party story. It is a story about how the rules of the chamber, the dynamics of small-margin majorities, the leverage of an organized minority within a majority, and the breakdown of leadership conventions can interact to paralyze the chamber. Walking through what happened, slowly, makes the structural causes visible.

What happened

January 2023: the 15-ballot election

Republicans won a narrow majority in the November 2022 elections — 222 seats to Democrats' 213. That gave the Republican conference a 9-seat margin: the Speaker, who is elected by a majority of those voting (not a plurality), needed essentially every Republican to win, since Democrats would unanimously support their own candidate (Hakeem Jeffries, D-NY).

Kevin McCarthy had been Republican leader since 2019 and was the presumptive Speaker. But a faction of about 20 House Republicans — primarily but not exclusively members of the Freedom Caucus — withheld their support. They had specific demands: changes to the House rules that would weaken the Speaker's power and strengthen rank-and-file members and committees; specific committee assignments for their members; commitments on the budget process; and a lowering of the threshold for a motion to vacate (the procedure for removing a Speaker), which had been raised under Speaker Pelosi.

Through the first 14 ballots — January 3 through January 6, 2023 — McCarthy fell short. The holdout group rotated nominees among themselves on some ballots (Andy Biggs of Arizona, Jim Jordan of Ohio, Byron Donalds of Florida); on other ballots, members voted "present" to lower the threshold. McCarthy negotiated. He gave concessions. The most consequential concession was lowering the motion-to-vacate threshold from a majority of the majority (Pelosi's standard) to a single member (the pre-2019 standard). Under this rule, any single House member could force a vote on removing the Speaker.

On the 15th ballot, in the early hours of January 7, 2023, McCarthy cleared the threshold — winning 216 votes to 212 for Jeffries (with six Republicans voting "present" rather than against him, lowering the bar to victory). The 15-ballot election broke the modern record. Comparable extended Speaker fights had not occurred since the antebellum period. The procedural concessions McCarthy made to win — particularly the single-member motion to vacate — would prove consequential.

October 2023: the motion to vacate

On October 2, 2023, Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL), a Freedom Caucus member, filed a motion to vacate the chair. Gaetz cited several grievances, principally McCarthy's handling of a continuing resolution (CR) that had passed September 30 with majority Democratic support and avoided a government shutdown. Gaetz argued that McCarthy had violated commitments he made in January regarding regular order and floor process. McCarthy countered that he had managed the CR to keep the government open in difficult negotiating circumstances.

The motion to vacate vote was held on October 3. Eight Republicans joined every Democrat in voting to vacate. The final tally: 216–210 to remove. McCarthy became the first Speaker in U.S. history to be removed by a successful motion to vacate. (Two prior Speakers, Joseph Cannon in 1910 and Newt Gingrich in 1998–99, had faced threats but resigned or evaded removal.)

The procedural mechanics matter. The Constitution does not provide for a formal Acting Speaker; the position must be filled by election. McCarthy designated Patrick McHenry (R-NC) as Speaker pro tempore — a holding role with limited authority. The House could not pass legislation, including pending appropriations work, while it lacked a Speaker. With a war erupting in Israel after October 7 and budget deadlines approaching, the institutional cost of the leadership vacuum mounted by the day.

The three-week scramble

Republicans turned to Steve Scalise (R-LA), the Majority Leader, on October 11. After winning the conference's internal nomination 113–99 over Jim Jordan, Scalise spent two days attempting to consolidate Republican support but could not get to 217 votes. He withdrew on October 12.

Jim Jordan (R-OH) — the chair of the Judiciary Committee, a Freedom Caucus founder, and a high-profile combative figure — was nominated next. Over October 17–20, Jordan lost three floor ballots, falling short of 217 each time. About 20 Republicans (mostly moderates) opposed him through the third ballot. Jordan withdrew on October 20.

Tom Emmer (R-MN), the Majority Whip, was nominated on October 24. Within hours, after former President Trump publicly opposed his candidacy and a number of conservatives indicated they would not support him, Emmer withdrew without ever reaching a floor vote.

The conference, in something close to despair, turned to Mike Johnson (R-LA), the Vice Chair of the Republican Conference and a soft-spoken constitutional lawyer with no executive leadership experience but limited enemies. Johnson was nominated on October 24 and elected Speaker on October 25, 2023, by a vote of 220–209. He had been in House leadership for less than a year. His election ended the three-week leadership vacuum.

What it shows

The proximate causes

The proximate causes of the 2023 saga are visible on the surface:

1. Small-margin majority. Republicans had a 9-seat margin in January 2023 (222–213) and effectively a 4-seat margin by October (after departures and special-election losses). With margins this small, any organized faction of as few as 5 members can deny the majority a working majority. The math is unforgiving.

2. The single-member motion-to-vacate concession. McCarthy's willingness to allow a single member to force a vote on his removal was the lever Gaetz used. Under Pelosi's threshold (majority of the majority), the motion would not have been brought. Under McCarthy's, it could be brought by anyone.

3. The Freedom Caucus's tactical organization. The Freedom Caucus, founded in 2015, has organized for exactly this kind of leverage. Its members are willing to vote against their party's leadership preferences, repeatedly, to win procedural concessions. In a small-margin Congress, that willingness is decisive.

4. The Hastert Rule's interaction with bipartisan dealmaking. McCarthy's handling of the September 30 CR — passing it with substantial Democratic support — violated the strict version of the Hastert Rule (majority of the majority). This was the precipitating grievance Gaetz cited. The structural irony: the same bipartisan dealmaking that the IIJA case study celebrated as functional, here, became the trigger for institutional crisis.

The structural causes

Beneath the proximate causes are deeper structural patterns.

Polarization compounds tight margins. When margins are tight, even small factions have leverage. When polarization is high, the option of building a working majority by reaching across the aisle is politically costly. McCarthy was in a strategic trap: he could keep his speakership only by holding his conference together, and his conference contained members whose policy and process demands could not be met without alienating either the moderate flank or the Senate.

Leadership offices have been hollowed out. Speakers Tip O'Neill (1977–87) and Newt Gingrich (1995–99) led conferences with much greater latitude than recent Speakers. The norms that gave Speakers control over committee assignments, floor scheduling, and member behavior have weakened. Modern Speakers manage a fragmented conference with strong factional caucuses and limited institutional levers.

Committee work has weakened relative to leadership work. As discussed in the chapter, more legislation now moves through leadership offices and less through committees. This means more issues get pushed up to the Speaker rather than resolved at the committee level — which puts more pressure on the speakership and increases the consequence of speakership disputes.

The motion-to-vacate procedure was always there but had been held at high threshold for a reason. The 2019 Pelosi rules change — requiring a majority of the majority to bring a motion to vacate — was made precisely because the single-member threshold creates this kind of risk. McCarthy's reversal of that rule, in exchange for January 2023 votes, restored the risk. The motion-to-vacate's history (rarely used since the 19th century) is partly the result of leadership conventions that no longer hold.

Donor and primary-electorate pressures push against compromise. Members who vote with leadership against the wishes of their conservative or progressive base face primary challenges. The Freedom Caucus's leverage is sustained by the fact that its members face primary risks, not general-election risks, from challenging leadership. The same dynamic exists on the Democratic side, though it has not produced an equivalent intra-party rebellion at the Speaker level.

What reasonable observers disagree about

The factual sequence of events is not contested. The interpretation is. Several questions are genuinely debated:

Is the Freedom Caucus's behavior a feature or a bug of decentralized democratic representation? Defenders argue that the Freedom Caucus represents a genuine constituency that demands procedural changes (less leadership control, more committee work, lower spending) and that the chamber is more democratic when those demands are negotiated rather than overridden. Critics argue that the chamber cannot function when 8–20 members can routinely block their own party's leadership and that something is structurally broken when removal of a Speaker can be triggered by a single member.
Did McCarthy's concessions cause the October crisis or just delay it? Some argue that McCarthy's January concessions were the seeds of October. Others argue that with the margin he had, no Speaker could have governed without similar concessions; the underlying problem is the small majority plus high polarization, not any specific procedural choice.
Is Speaker Johnson's tenure stable, or has the institutional dysfunction been masked? Johnson has held the Speakership through 2024 and into 2025–26 with few public crises. Whether this reflects institutional repair, a temporarily quiet Republican conference, or simply Johnson's lower public profile is a question each reader can decide for themselves.

What both case studies, together, show

The IIJA (Case Study 1) and the 2023 Speaker's race (Case Study 2) are two halves of a single picture. The same institution, in the same period (2021–23), produced both a remarkable bipartisan accomplishment and a remarkable institutional collapse. That is not a contradiction. It is a description.

The institution can do real work when the conditions are right. The institution can also melt down when the conditions are wrong. The work of a serious student of Congress is to understand what produces each outcome — and to resist the temptation to either of the lazy summaries: "Congress is broken" or "Congress works fine if you ignore the noise." Neither is right. Both are partly true. The chapter, like the institution, holds both at once.