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
David Waldman@Pwnallthethings I think the right answer is that Members-elect are recognized for admission to the floor and for voting privileges by authority of the Clerk of the House, who is a Constitutional officer of the House with a term that ends upon the election(by the majority) of her successor.
Whey Standard@KagroX @Pwnallthethings wait, how is the clerk a constitutional officer? The position doesn’t appear once in the constitution.
@Whey_standard @Pwnallthethings The Clerk is one of the "other officers" elected under Art. I, sec. 2.
@KagroX @Pwnallthethings a constitutional officer is one whose office is explicitly established by the Constitution, one one whose office is merely authorized. Every officer would be a constitutional officer if the latter were true.
@Whey_standard Section 2 says the House chooses "their Speaker and other Officers."
Who are the other officers? Not the Majority or Minority Leaders -- they're chosen by the parties. So are the Whips, etc.
The other officers are the Clerk, Sergeant at Arms, and in current practice, the Chief Administrative Officer.
@KagroX they’re whomever the House decides, because the offices aren’t established by the Constitution, unlike speaker.
@Whey_standard They are whomever the House decides. That’s the answer. And the House only decides on the Speaker and three other officers. The House shall “chuse” it’s officers. And no one is chosen by the House save those four. That means something. The he choice is constitutionally authorized, even if the title is not enumerated.
@Whey_standard I guess if you don't love the constitutional officer theory, there's just plain statute. The Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946 statutorily assigned the Clerk the duty to call the House to order and preside over the election of the Speaker.
@Whey_standard This may not be correct! It comes from a note in Jefferson's Manual, but either I'm missing the provision in the Act, or the Manual was referring to some other duty of the Clerk referenced in that paragraph.
@KagroX I just don’t like calling them constitutional officers is all.
@Whey_standard I guess you don't have to. The Clerk is still in office at the start of a new Congress, and is the officer authorized to collect and examine all certificates of election, so that's a reasonable qualification to me for the job of granting recognition to Members-elect for certain purposes.