Understanding Congress

What Are the Duties of the Speaker of the House of Representatives? (with Paul Ryan)

Dec. 5, 2022

The topic of this episode is, “What are the Duties of the Speaker of the House of Representatives?”

My guest is Paul Ryan. Paul Ryan was the 54th Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. In office from October 2015 to January 2019, he was the youngest Speaker in nearly 150 years.

Prior to becoming Speaker of the House, Paul served as the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. He also served as Chairman of the House Budget Committee from 2011-2015. In 2012, he was selected to serve as Governor Mitt Romney’s Vice-Presidential nominee. Paul was first elected to Congress at age 28 and represented Wisconsin’s First District for two decades.

Kevin Kosar:

Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It's a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be, and that is why we are here to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I'm your host, Kevin Kosar, and I'm a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank in Washington DC.

Speaker Ryan, welcome to the podcast.

Paul Ryan:

Kevin, good to be with you. Thanks for having me.

Kevin Kosar:

Article 1 of the US Constitution states, "The House of Representatives shall choose their Speaker and other officers." How does the House pick a Speaker these days?

Paul Ryan:

The way it works is the majority party in their conference—we call the Republican body the Conference, the Democrats call theirs the Caucus—will have a vote as to whom they nominate for Speaker. That's a plurality vote—the person who gets the most votes wins. Kevin McCarthy won that, which means he is to be presented to the full House on January 3rd when a new session is sworn in and he has to get—or she, in Nancy [Pelosi]'s case—has to get 218 votes. The Democratic Caucus will also vote on who they nominate to be the Speaker. If [Pelosi] stays, they'll probably nominate her. If not, I don't know, Hakeem Jeffries or somebody like that.

A candidate must win a majority vote—218 votes—on the House floor when the new session is sworn in. Then that person is sworn in by the Dean of the House—the longest serving member—and that Speaker becomes the newly-installed Speaker for that new session of Congress. Then that person swears in all of Congress. That's how it gets started.

Kevin Kosar:

The Constitution says the House shall have a Speaker, but it doesn’t provide a full job description. In the earliest days of the Republic, the Speaker’s duty was to preside over the chamber—to be the guy who runs the meeting. Times sure have changed. What are the duties and responsibilities of the Speaker today?

Paul Ryan:

Yeah, they're endless and infinite in some ways. It is not like it was in the old days. It's a bigger Congress—there are more states than they envisioned and the government does so many more things than it used to do in the first Congresses.

You're basically the chief executive officer of the legislative branch. You oversee the entire legislative branch, so technically you have something like 12,500 employees. In a way, you’re like the mayor of the legislative branch, overseeing the legislative council, the law enforcement agency, the power plant, the janitors, etc. And you have deputies that run all of that—whom you appoint—such as the...

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