Flamethrower Elon Musk floated for House speaker as government funding mayhem ramps up
They Musk be joking.
Some Republicans are daydreaming over the prospect of billionaire guru and occasional literal flamethrower Elon Musk clinching the speaker’s gavel in the wake of a revolt against House GOP leadership over government funding.
“The Speaker of the House need not be a member of Congress,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) underscored on X, becoming the first Republican to publicly muse over the idea in recent days.
“Nothing would disrupt the swamp more than electing Elon Musk … think about it … nothing’s impossible. (not to mention the joy at seeing the collective establishment, aka ‘uniparty,’ lose their ever-lovin’ minds).”
The Constitution does not mandate that the speaker be a sitting member of Congress, but there has never been a non-representative serving in that leadership role before.
Musk, 53, the world’s richest man, helped foment uproar among conservatives against the bipartisan government funding bill that congressional leadership rolled out late Tuesday to avert a government shutdown from midnight Friday into Saturday.
President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance subsequently urged Republicans to slap down the bill and nudged GOP leadership to recalibrate, rendering the measure effectively dead on arrival in a blow to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), 52.
Thus far, only a handful of lawmakers dangled the prospect of Musk taking the reins in the lower chamber and the concept does not appear to have strong traction within the House Republican conference for now.
“I’d be open to supporting @elonmusk for Speaker of the House. DOGE can only truly be accomplished by reigning in Congress to enact real government efficiency. The establishment needs to be shattered just like it was yesterday,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) posted on X.
Other GOP lawmakers are privately enraged by Musk’s intervention in the government funding tempest.
Last month, Trump, 78, announced Musk and fellow entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy as co-heads of the newly minted Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which is not an actual government department.
Greene, 50, is helming the DOGE Caucus in the House of Representatives.
Musk and Ramaswamy, 39, swung through Congress earlier this month to brainstorm ideas with GOP lawmakers on ways to root out government waste.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) speculated that the “writing is on the wall” and that new leadership in the House is “inevitable” and “would revolutionize everything.”
“If that’s the case, I think we need to go outside the box. I think we need to look to a different place,” Lee told conservative host Benny Johnson, pitching Musk or Ramaswamy to be the speaker. “Let them choose one of them — I don’t care which one — to be their speaker.”
Democrats have similarly dangled the idea — though in a backhanded way to jab at Republican infighting and ostensibly to leverage Musk’s and Trump’s egos in an effort to kick up friction between the pair.
“If Elon Musk is kind of cosplaying co-President here, I don’t know why Trump doesn’t just hand him the Oval Office, or Speaker Johnson should maybe just hand Elon Musk the gavel if they just want that billionaire to run the country,” Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) told reporters.
“Speaker Mike Johnson: maybe it’s easier to just hand your gavel over to Musk,” Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) said in a swipe on X.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) lamented to reporters that “I don’t have the answers right now” when asked whom he was actually negotiating with on government funding.
With their threadbare, rambunctious House majority, Republicans have previously floundered over their speaker.
Infamously, at the start of the current Congress, former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) took 15 rounds before he was able to win the gavel.
Some nine months later, he was deposed in a shocking mutiny, which effectively ground the House to a halt for about a month as Republicans dithered over his successor.
During that impasse, some members had floated Trump as a potential successor, but he rejected that push. Johnson survived an ouster attempt earlier this year after getting a bailout from Democrats.
The speaker’s election will be held on Jan. 3, 2025. Should Johnson fail to nab the gavel, there are concerns about an impasse stymying certification of the 2024 election on Jan. 6, 2025.
Trump has maintained that Johnson can “easily” hold onto his job if he course-corrects on government funding.
“If the speaker acts decisively, and tough, and gets rid of all of the traps being set by the Democrats, which will economically and, in other ways, destroy our country, he will easily remain speaker,” Trump told Fox News.
