Will Thomas Massie Get To Pick the Next Speaker of the House?

It’s nearly time once again for everyone’s favorite congressional game show: Who Can Get Elected Speaker of the House?

When the new session of Congress opens on Friday, one of the first orders of business will be deciding who gets to hold the gavel. Despite a Republican takeover of the White House and the Senate, November’s election did not do much to change or lessen the drama in the House, where the GOP still clings to a very narrow majority. As in the past few years, that means any Republican who wants to be speaker needs to secure support from nearly all of his party’s members in the chamber.

Current Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R–La.) has the “Complete & Total Endorsement” of President-elect Donald Trump in his bid to retain the gavel. That might be all it takes to come out on top. It certainly doesn’t hurt. Resistance to Johnson’s reelection “is now futile,” former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R–Fla.), who led the effort to oust Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R–Calif.) from the speakership, told the New York Post earlier this week.

But nothing is a sure bet in this House of Representatives until the last votes have been counted, and there’s at least one Republican who is vowing to resist Johnson’s reelection.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.), the libertarian-adjacent lawmaker who holds a post on the powerful House Rules Committee, tells The Wall Street Journal that he will vote against Johnson’s reelection as speaker. And he apparently doesn’t care what consequences he might face for complicating the speakership vote.

“I don’t know how to say this without cussing,” Massie told the Journal. “If they thought I had no Fs to give before, I definitely have no Fs to give now.” (That’s possibly the second-best Massie quote of all time, though it’s still well behind his 2017 theory of what Republican primary voters are doing.)

Specifically, Massie is upset with Johnson over his support for military aid to Ukraine, his support for reauthorizing a domestic spying program, and his handling of the continuing resolution drama last month. Trump’s “endorsement of Mike Johnson is going to work out about as well as his endorsement of Speaker Paul Ryan,” Massie posted on X this week.

Massie, it’s worth noting, opposed the ouster of McCarthy, which eventually led to Johnson ascending to the House’s highest post. Just before McCarthy got the boot, Massie warned that the next speaker would likely be worse and that ongoing chaos in the House would give greater leverage to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) on issues that really matter, like spending.

Whether Johnson has been a worse speaker than McCarthy depends on your perspective, but that second prediction turned out to be essentially true. The House passed several budget bills last year, but all withered in the Senate and the year ended with another Christmastime fight over a continuing resolution that did not reduce spending (and, in fact, increased it).

For now, it remains an open question whether Massie has enough support to hold up Johnson’s reelection. He wouldn’t need much help.

Here’s the basic math: There are 435 seats in the House, which means it would require 218 votes to win a majority, if all the seats are full on Friday. Republicans won 220 seats in November, but at least one of those is likely to be vacant—Gaetz has said he does not plan to return to Congress after resigning last month, even though he would be eligible to return when the new session begins. Other seats will be vacated in the near future, since several sitting Republicans have been appointed to posts in the Trump administration, but that’s unlikely to affect Friday’s speakership vote.

The narrowness of the majority means that any handful of Republican lawmakers could hold up the process of picking a speaker—and nothing else can happen in the chamber until that selection is made.

Massie says he has nothing to lose. That won’t be enough to stop Johnson’s return as speaker, but it won’t take a whole lot more.

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