hold on.
Like to be clear, under this amendment, if a representative also happens to be the chair of his or her party, and then resigns and deregisters right afterwards, the Speaker gets to pick anyone from that party - a longtime member or someone who joined the party minutes earlier - and they get to do this even if the party has a clearly established Deputy Chair position or other line of succession which is perfectly intact. All this does is allow the majority to continually come swoop in and add extra seats to itself. The provision about being a party member at the time of the vacancy is also irrelevant, as the speaker's party could easily register duds ahead of time.
First part of this, regarding providing for a Deputy chair appointing someone - I see no issue with if still feasible to add at this stage.
The second part - asserting that the majority could use this to expand its majority- seems extraordinarily unlikely:
The hypothetical resigning representative you created here is not only a chair, but a chair of a party diametrically opposed to everything being done by the Speaker. Therefore, they are hardly going to telegraph their intentions to resign and deregister ahead of time. Rather, it is near certain the event would happen suddenly and at a time the speaker's party could not predict. So in order to "register duds ahead of time", the speaker would have to direct certain individual(s) to not just register with a non preferred party for a few days, but for an extended period of time of months or perhaps years, in hopes that the opposing Chair-Representative might possibly resign suddenly one day. Beyond such problems as these shadow members not being able to vote in their preferred party's conventions or receive automatic endorsements, and the fact they'd need to spend months deflecting questions on discord about what exactly they're doing (making it unlikely active players would agree to such a long term scheme that would have no guarantee of even resulting in anything at its outset), It would also be highly likely that the Chair-Representative would put two and two together, realize what was being attempted, and ensure they did appoint a replacement after their eventual resignation and before their eventual deregistration.
So, in short, to take advantage of this "loophole", the Speaker would need to set up a scheme far more elaborate and long lasting than the GGPR, and also get incredibly lucky to keep anyone from noticing what was being planned, since the signs of suspicious registration would be out there and public well ahead of time. And then they would have to luck out that the opposing Chair-Representative ended up just deregistering without appointing a replacement, even though the Chair-Representative would know that doing this would let a speaker they emphatically oppose appoint such a replacement.
This scenario is so out there that I'm not even sure it's worth preventing.
That being said, if this is a real concern, and one that the majority actually wants to resolve, there are a few other entities the Speaker could be replaced with:
- The most senior remaining congressional member of the party of the departed member - if the departed member was the only member of their party in the Congress and it has no leadership then it goes to special.
- A supermajority vote of the legislative chamber
- Perhaps some sort of special Bipartisan Committee on Vacancies - this would need fleshing out.....
