General Discussion

Unless he’s talking about four special elections to fill vacant seats before Election Day (that I haven’t heard anything about and the excerpt didn’t mention), Mike Johnson won’t have any say about not seating newly elected members because he will not be speaker at the opening of the next congress on January 3, 2027.

On that date, all the members-elect, as certified by their respective states gather at the Capitol and choose a speaker. Since there will be more Dem members-elect than Republicans, the next speaker will be a Democrat, who will then swear in the rest of the House en masse.

There is a mechanism where a member-elect can rise and object to the seating of another member-elect, but such a move would set off a cascade of tit-for-tat objections, resulting in nobody getting sworn in that day, which is why it has never happened (Hawaii’s first rep is the single asterisk AFAIK).