Is this the longest-ever House speaker vote? A brief history of races for the gavel

Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox Get our free Inside Washington email Get our free Inside Washington email SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy The House of Representatives remains without a speaker to succeed veteran Democrat Nancy Pelosi as the new Republican majority fails to agree on a candidate after three days of bitter in-fighting. California congressman and House majority leader Kevin McCarthy has suffered the extraordinary indignity of failing to secure the 218 votes needed to claim the gavel in no fewer than 11 successive roll call votes, as a group of hard right Republicans part of the “Freedom Caucus” group, or as they have been deemed, the “Never Kevins”, continue to refuse to back him, delaying the start of the 118th Congress in the process. “We cannot conduct constituent casework to the same extent that we would otherwise and as a result, the longer this goes on, the more real impact there is and the more people are going to suffer.” There is no obvious end in sight to at the time of writing, meaning the humiliation of Mr McCarthy, has already resulted in the longest House speaker vote since 1855. A complicating factor in the selection of a House speaker is that the US Constitution has almost nothing to say about how the lower chamber is supposed to go about it, according to Matthew Green, a professor of political science at the Catholic University of America “All it says in Article One… is ‘The House shall choose their speaker.’ That’s it,” he told The Washington Post.