The speaker vote taking place in the House of Commons is a once-in-a-lifetime battle – literally. A House Speaker election has not needed many votes in 100 years.
In the more than 200 years since the first biennial Congress met in 1789, such scuffles – so named when members of the House of Representatives need multiple votes to elect a speaker – have only occurred. 14 times. according to historian.
All but one of those multi-vote speaker elections took place before the Civil War when the two-party system was evolving. Back then, fighting on the floor was commonplace.
A floor war has only happened once since the Civil War, exactly 100 years ago, when it took nine votes to Congressman Frederick Gillett of Massachusetts to be elected speaker in 1923.
Here’s a look back at history:
