PwnallthethingsSo this is a fun little tweet by Adam Kinzinger. But no. Mr Kinzinger is not still a congressman.
More fun tho is that *nobody* is a Representative right now
Kinzinger lost his status by direct force of the 20th Amendment. That put him out of the job at 12:00 on January 3rd.
But none of the newly elected members have yet taken their oaths--they're waiting to elect the Speaker--and under Article IV that means they aren't full members
Which leads to a fun question: if there are no Representatives in the House of Representatives ... why are they even allowed to vote for a Speaker in the first place?
The right answer is probably "you don't need to know, this is arcane weird stuff, and they'll eventually elect a Speaker and it'll all work out"
But if you do want to dive in, here's why
https://www.pwnallthethings.com/p/the-house-has-no-members-and-the
The House has No Members and the Bootstrapping of Power
Over at Dog Shirt Daily—the awfully named, but otherwise great daily publication by Ben Wittes—Ben has a really interesting question that he proceeds quickly to not answer: does the House have any Representatives? The motivation for his question is this post by Adam Kinzinger
Ramiro@Pwnallthethings you say at the end that it doesn't really matter what order things are done in, but the speaker is a constitutional office and second in the line of succession of the presidency.
What happens if, for example, the president and the vice president both die right now? Or after a speaker is "chosen" but before the rules are voted on?
The obvious answer is "legal chaos" I guess.
Whey Standard@ramirof @Pwnallthethings it actually seems pretty straightforward, that office is vacant right now, a possibility explicitly considered by the Presidential Succession Act, so the president pro tempore of the senate would become president.
Jay Wolman@Whey_standard @ramirof @Pwnallthethings the Speaker needn’t be a member. So why does the Speaker’s term expire even if the membership they hold does? My thesis: Nancy Pelosi is still speaker.