Can Joe Biden Intervene in a House Speaker Vote As President?

As the chaos that has embroiled the House Republican Caucus entered its third day Thursday, President Joe Biden's White House has already made one thing clear: that the disfunction in the House was Republicans' mess to clean up, and theirs alone.

"We're certainly not going to insert ourselves in what's happening on the other side of Pennsylvania Avenue," White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters earlier this week.

"He was a senator, he understands how this process works, and he's just not going to insert himself, he's going to let the process play out and continue to do the work of the American people," she added.

Procedurally, there's nothing Biden can do, per the House rules. That framework dictates that the process of deciding who leads their conference is solely up to its members, who have so far failed to give any single candidate the plurality they need to become Speaker of the House in almost one-dozen consecutive votes.

Entering the fourth day of votes for Speaker of the House Friday, some wondered if there was an imperative for him to act.

The House of Representatives cannot consider or pass legislation until a speaker is seated, and, currently, there appears to be little indication the far-right House Freedom Caucus—which has so far refused to support leading Republican Kevin McCarthy's bid for the post—plans to yield any time soon.

Truthfully, there's little incentive for Biden to do anything: the Republican Party comes into the 118^th Congress with a majority, which top Republican Kevin McCarthy has pledged to wield to obstruct numerous facets of the Biden administration's agenda.

He has also pledged to lead myriad investigations into a number of cabinet-level officials like FBI director Christopher Wray and Department of Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas, whom Republicans have targeted as the central figure in the Biden administration's perceived failures at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Even conservatives admit that there is really no rush to seat a speaker of the house anytime soon.

"The stakes for the Speakership of the House are incredibly low at this point because all the leader of the House, basically, has to do is say 'no' to most of Joe Biden's proposals," conservative commentator Ben Shapiro said on his daily podcast earlier this week.

In short: if Republicans are trying to build a coalition against the Biden administration, they're going to have to do it alone—despite Biden's longstanding reputation as a dealmaker willing to work across the aisle.

"With regards to the fight over the Speaker...that's not my problem," Biden told reporters as he left the White House for an appearance in Kentucky Wednesday afternoon.

"I just think it's a little embarrassing that it's taking so long," he added.

Presidents in recent history rarely involved themselves in the process. Barack Obama—who had a reportedly rocky relationship with former Republican speaker Paul Ryan—remained on the sidelines of his contentious 2015 bid for the post amid the party's then-Republican majority.

Looking back, however, there was at least one episode in early U.S. history where a president got intimately involved with the process. In 1834, then-president Andrew Jackson—a former Speaker of the House himself—sought to lobby friendly members of Congress to appoint future president James K. Polk for the post.

However, when members of his "Kitchen Cabinet"—a group of unofficial advisers he'd appointed in a break with his then-Vice President—went to Capitol Hill to lobby on Polk's behalf, many members of Congress, including some in Jackson's own party, perceived the effort as an encroachment upon the constitutional prerogative of the House, leading to a splintering of his party.