Doesn't matter. He can still be nominated and voted as Speaker. West would be great against the Dims.
That would be a great move, but the castrated GOPers would never do it.
That interpretation assumes that when the Framers placed the words “the House of Representatives shall choose thir Speaker” in Article I of the U.S. Constitution they were not basing the speakership on the Speaker of the House of Commons of the British Parliament, which most definitely *did* need to be filled by a Member of the House of Commons. The reason that they didn’t write “the House of Representatives shall choose thir Speaker *from among their members*” was because it was deemed to be self-evident, since the Speaker is the leader of the House and the leader must come from within the group—had the Framers intended to allow the House to elect a Speaker that was not a member of the body, such a clear departure from parliamentary precedent would have been specifically noted, and they likely would have selected a title other than Speaker. The one instance in the U.S. Constitution where the presiding officer would not be a member of the body he presided was when the Vice President is made, ex officio, the President of the Senate, but he was specifically designated as such in Article I, and the fact that the VP is not a member of the Senate was probably the reason why they didn’t baptize the presiding officer of the Senate as “the Speaker of the Senate.”
No one believes that the Chief Justice of the United States can be someone other than a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and, until a few years ago (when a couple of Republicans upset at Newt Gingrich voted for retired Republicans for Speaker) no one other than a sitting Representative had even received a vote for Speaker. I think the theory of the non-member of the House serving as Speaker is an interesting exercise in constitutional analysis, as is the theory that the Governor of New York could be in the line of succession to the presidency (a governor is, after all, an “officer”), but having a non-member serve as Speaker ultimately would be a distortion of the Framers’ original intent.