The phrase “Motion to Vacate” has been in the news several times during the 118th United States Congress. Prior to the current sitting of the United States House of Representatives, such a thing was a rarity, but this congressional mechanism is getting more attention today.
What Is The “Motion to Vacate?”
Simply put, a motion to vacate the chair is a procedure within the American legislative system to remove the Speaker of the House in the middle of the term. If such a vote is successful, the House proceeds to do what it does on the first day of every Congress: elect a new speaker. The chair remains vacant until a candidate receives a simple majority of the total number of votes, which would be 218 out of 435, if all seats are occupied and all members are present. Until a speaker is seated, the House cannot undertake any business.
Motion to Vacate: “The Before-Time”
In the 117 Congresses prior to 2023, there had been just one official attempt at a speaker’s chair vacancy motion in 1910. Joseph Gurney Cannon, Republican from Illinois, faced a motion to vacate towards the end of his eight-year tenure as Speaker of the House. A foe of Roosevelt progressivism from within the president’s own party, Cannon’s sturdy, conservative grip over his GOP caucus waned during the first two years of the Taft administration, and his leadership eventually became untenable. After Cannon lost a key vote thanks to Progressive Republicans in revolt, the Democrats moved an immediate motion to vacate, but even Cannon’s intraparty opponents voted against it rather than potentially see a Democrat claim the speakership. (The Democrats would win the gavel on their own in the 1910 midterm elections.)
In 2015, John Boehner, Republican of Ohio, faced the prospect of a vacancy motion. Though it was filed, it never made it out of committee. Boehner resigned from the chair mid-term, anyway, and was replaced by Paul Ryan. There was also an ill-fated attempt at removing Democrat Nancy Pelosi in 2019, not just to vacate the chair, but expel her from the House.
The 118th Congress
In the 2022 midterm elections, the Republicans won a narrow majority in the US House of Representatives, with 222 seats against 213 Democrats. Despite flipping the House, the election results were seen as somewhat of a disappointment for the GOP, coming up with a net gain of just nine seats, well short of recent historical average gains for opposition parties during midterm elections. Nevertheless, Kevin McCarthy and his Republicans rode into power in January 2023, though the size of their majority matters quite a bit in this story.
The first tell that this would be an historic Congress – perhaps for all the wrong reasons – was McCarthy’s election to the chair. It took 15 ballots to elect him in the face of opposition from within his own party, making it the longest speakership election since 1860. Around 20 Republicans, when he could only afford to lose four rebels, opposed McCarthy’s election until the 12th ballot, when the numbers dwindled.
McCarthy then lasted just nine months in the job before a motion to vacate came along, due to intraparty dissatisfaction with his leadership and advancing a spending bill to avoid a government shutdown. Almost all Democrats and a handful of disgruntled Republicans, some of the same people from the January speakership election turmoil, approved the motion, the first time in history such a resolution was successful. McCarthy was ousted and it took the House over a week to elect a new speaker.
The GOP caucus ultimately settled on Mike Johnson, at the time a little-known Republican from Louisiana, after several other candidates failed to unify the party.
But…
Mike Johnson was elected House speaker in October 2023, finding himself in a difficult political position. His House majority has shrunk due to resignations and a special election loss in New York, leaving the same Republicans who plotted McCarthy’s exit with even more of a hold on the balance of power.
There is also yet another motion to boot the sitting speaker in the offing. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican who is very much an ally of Donald Trump, has pledged to push a motion to vacate Johnson’s speakership after the House passed several spending bills and avoided a government shutdown while also providing foreign aid to Ukraine and Israel. Republicans Thomas Massie (Kentucky) and Paul Gosar (Arizona) also support the motion, which is not yet being brought to the floor.
Will Mike Johnson be kicked out of the chair in an even shorter speakership than McCarthy? That depends on the Democrats. The minority party made it clear they were not going to bail McCarthy out last year, but the new effort by Greene and her allies will not succeed without Democratic votes – just about all of them, in fact, unless the GOP rebellion grows. So far, Hakeem Jeffries’ House Democratic caucus has not indicated their support, but with the House majority so narrow and fractious, he and his party hold the fate of Johnson’s speakership in their hands for now.
Only one prior Congress, dating back to the 18th Century, ever had a motion to vacate the chair come to the floor for a vote. It is unlikely but possible that the 118th Congress will have two such motions, which is unprecedented. Even if it does not, this GOP House still made history, albeit dubiously.
