The new Congress convenes on Tuesday.  After the new members are sworn in (including that con artist from Long Island), the first task of business of the House of Representatives is the election of the Speaker.  [CORRECTION:  Before new members are sworn in.]

Traditionally, the election of a speaker has been a formality.  The majority party votes for their chosen speaker, and the speaker is elected on the first ballot.  But, like a southern primary, the election of the speaker requires that a candidate get a majority of the votes (not counting those who vote present).  And representatives have become more willing to vote for a “third” candidate or vote present.  When a party has a working majority, a small segment of the party expressing disagreement over their party’s choice for speaker is simply a statement.  But when a party has a narrow majority, defectors can cause problems.

When the House convenes on Tuesday, the Republicans will have a 222-212 majority (due to the vacancy in Virginia which will not be filled until February).  There are a significant number of (anti-)Freedom Caucus members who think spineless Kevin McCarthy is not sufficiently wacko to be Speaker.  On Tuesday, we will find out if that number is fewer than five (in which case it does not matter) or more than ten (in which case McCarthy will not have a majority on the first ballot) and whether these members will vote for an alternative candidate (in which case five would block McCarthy) or abstain (in which case eleven would make Hakeem Jeffries the speaker).

Now being more concerned with the title than actually being a successful speaker, McCarthy has been trying to give away the House to get to 218 votes.  But some of the members of the QOP will not be satisfied with anything other than McCarthy giving up all of power of the Speaker’s Office and agreeing that the sole agenda item is to create chaos.  As things stand on New Year’s Eve, it looks like, for the first time in 100 years, we could have a second ballot for speaker.  And that’s where things get interesting.

The most vulnerable members of the Republican caucus (those from districts that voted for Biden in 2020) seem to be all-in on McCarthy being Speaker.  But it is unclear how much of that is trying to convince the extremists to back down from their demands for rule changes and committee assignment that would hamstring the Republican caucus to allow the extremist to grandstand on every issue and push propaganda from the Kremlin and the alt-right.

Let’s be clear, the first ballot is essentially a test vote.  It will tell how strong the burn down the House faction is.  If McCarthy fails to win on the first ballot, we will then see additional efforts to tear off members of the chaos caucus by offering rules changes.  But after several ballots, the question is whether there is some movement from the handful of traditional Republicans left in the Republican Party.  Will they try to find an alternative speaker who could get maybe half of the Republican caucus and half of the Democratic Party to support a compromise (in exchange for rules that give the minority more power to bring legislation to the floor that has bipartisan support).  Or will they work with the Q caucus to find some alternative to McCarthy that everybody can live with.

The answer to what happens next will make a big difference in how the next two years go.  If a bipartisan compromise candidate emerges, then, perhaps, we will see committee chairs who want real oversight rather than spending the next two years talking about Afghanistan and Hunter Biden and the ability to move compromise legislation to the Senate.  If McCarthy has to accept being metaphorically castrated to become Speaker or some candidate even more beholden to the Wacko Chorus becomes Speaker, we could be heading toward a disaster in which the House refuses to pass essential legislation related to appropriations and the debt ceiling (or passes those bills in a form that neither the Senate nor President Biden will accept).

Elections have consequences, but margins in elections matter too.  And over the next week, vulnerable members of the Republican caucus will have to decide whether serving their constituents matters more than blind obedience to a party that has lost its way.  Their choice will be a big omen for how the next two years will go.