THE Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, the lower chamber of Congress, is in some ways the second-most powerful figure in Washington, DC, after the President.

Elected by the body’s majority party, the speaker is the political and parliamentary leader, and the administrative head of the House as well as its presiding officer. They are also the second in the US presidential line of succession, after the vice-president, and ahead of the President Pro Tempore of the US Senate.

So after the 435 members of the House failed to elect a speaker for the 118th Congress, and when the office of the speaker was vacant for four days, it meant that if for some reason both President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris had been incapacitated late last week, the current president of the US Senate, Senator Patty Murray of Washington state, would have had to take over at the White House.