“We’ve only just begun …” – Paul Williams, Roger Nichols, and Karen and Richard Carpenter

There are 435 members in the U.S. House of Representatives.

If you happen to be a math whiz or have your cell phone calculator within reach, you can quickly determine you need 218 people out of the 435 to reach the bare minimum required for a majority.

Last Friday the members of the U.S. Congress were sworn in, and one of their first duties was to choose their leaders. The U.S. House is led by the speaker of the House who must be elected by a majority vote of the House membership.

Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., was re-elected as speaker. Wanna guess how many votes he had? If you remember your lesson on context clues in elementary school, you do not even have to be a math whiz to figure out Johnson’s vote total was 218.

Only three days into the new year, and we already are feeling the razor burn from our first political close shave.

The choosing of the speaker of the House is a bigger deal than you might realize.

It is undisputed the presidency is the most powerful position in American government. This might logically lead you to the conclusion that the vice president must be the second most powerful position, but the speaker of the House is widely considered to hold that designation.

To put it simply, the House of Representatives does not function without a speaker, and no bill can be passed without the House of Representatives. It is up to the speaker to carry out and enforce the rules of order for the entire House, assign bills introduced by representatives to committees, and allow legislation to be debated by the entire House.

Even Donald Trump’s ability to assume the presidency would have been in doubt without a speaker since it is up to Congress to certify the presidential election results before a president can be inaugurated on Jan. 20, the date required by the U.S. Constitution.

Republicans have been in control of the House of Representatives since January 2023, but the party’s ability to wield power has been a bumpy ride mainly due to Republicans’ razor-thin majority over the Democrats during this time.

Infighting among Republicans two years ago caused the House to vote 15 times before reaching enough votes to elect Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., as speaker.

Despite coming together to elect McCarthy, the fragile peace among Republican representatives fell apart when eight Republicans joined with Democrats and voted to remove McCarthy as speaker only 10 months later.

It was the first time in American history a sitting speaker had been voted out of the position in the middle of a term. This caused the House to stop all its business until Johnson was finally voted into the speaker position three weeks later.

Last week the House only had to vote one time to reappoint Johnson as speaker, but the suspense around this vote would have been enough to elicit a, “Whoa, Nellie,” from late sportscaster Keith Jackson.

One Republican House member had already stated he would not vote for Johnson which meant every single other Republican would have to support Johnson for him to be chosen.

Two other Republicans initially voted for other options but flipped their votes to Johnson shortly before the voting period officially closed. Media reports stated those two Congress members flipped after face-to-face conversations with Johnson and a phone call from Trump.

It was a political victory for Johnson, but he now has a nearly impossible task of holding together a Republican delegation of 219 people to vote for the legislation he wants passed. Assuming Democrats stick together, this means he can only afford one Republican defection for every bill he supports.

Try getting 18 people to agree on even the most innocuous topic. Do you like puppies? Is ice cream good? Often there will be at least one holdout to prevent a unanimous response.

Now add 200 more people debating deeply complex legislation, and the prospects for agreement are about as daunting as it can get.

One positive for Johnson is the House passed rules of order that make removing the speaker more difficult. That provides him with more job security than his predecessor, McCarthy.

However, the prospects for dysfunction in the House remain high, and the threshold for removal is far from impossible. If nine or more Republican House members decide they are tired of Johnson, they can force a vote to remove him, and the operation of the House will be back in limbo.

Johnson’s tap dance through the minefield of keeping everybody happy all the time begins in earnest on Trump’s Inauguration Day.