The new Pa. House speaker was a surprise. Here’s what happened.

Pennsylvania House lawmakers have elected Rep. Mark Rozzi speaker of the House, a veteran Democratic lawmaker from Berks County.

Rozzi, who was backed by Democrats and some Republicans, said Tuesday he would govern as an independent.

Here’s what happened in the surprise vote and what could come next:

The members were sworn in Tuesday, the first day of the new 2023-24 legislative session. As they organized the legislature for the new session, they were required to take their first big vote: Which of the representatives did they want to empower as the new speaker of the House?

The unexpected sequence began when Republican leadership supported a Democrat to become the next House speaker, while Republicans grip a razor-thin majority in the House until three special elections in solid-blue districts take place next month. Democrats also supported the GOP’s Democratic choice for speaker, moderate Democrat Rep. Mark Rozzi.

Once Rozzi was sworn in, he announced that he would be the state’s first independent speaker. He said he would not join the internal deliberations of Republicans or Democrats.

» READ MORE: A Democrat-turned-independent is now speaker of the Pa. House after a surprise vote

Mark Rozzi, a Democratic state representative from Berks County. The speaker is the highest-ranking member of the House, and it’s an institutional role — specifically named in the state Constitution — with a lot of power. The speaker is in charge of the chamber, including deciding when to call lawmakers into session.

Rozzi has been an elected Democrat since he first joined the House in 2013, representing parts of Reading and its surrounding suburbs. However, in his speech after being elected, Rozzi said he wouldn’t caucus with either party and would serve as an independent voice. It wasn’t immediately clear whether that meant he would be formally leaving the Democratic Party — or whether such a move would be temporary.

Rozzi is the state’s top advocate in the General Assembly for survivors of childhood sexual abuse, as a survivor himself. He was a key part of pushing a constitutional amendment to extend the statute of limitations for adults who survived sexual abuse as children to sue their abusers or the institutions that protected them, in the wake of a 2018 grand jury report documenting decades of abuse by Roman Catholic priests in Pennsylvania.

» READ MORE: Who is Pa. House Speaker Mark Rozzi?

State Rep. Joanna McClinton (D., Philadelphia) was poised to make history on Tuesday as the first woman elected to serve as speaker of the House. She’d previously made history in 2020 when she became the first woman to serve as Democratic leader. She’s known nationally as a rising star in the Democratic Party.

No, they elected Mark Rozzi, a white man.

Democrats won a majority of the 203 seats in the Pennsylvania House in the 2022 midterms — after 12 years of Republican control. Democrats won 102 of the seats, and Republicans won 101.

Democrats won the slimmest possible majority, and they faced an immediate challenge: Democratic Rep. Tony DeLuca died in October, after ballots had already been finalized, and he was reelected in a suburban Pittsburgh district that leans Democratic. That meant Democrats would have one immediate vacancy.

Two Democrats were reelected to their state House seats while also being elected to higher office: Summer Lee was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and Austin Davis was elected as lieutenant governor. They submitted their resignations in early December.

That meant Democrats, despite having won 102 seats to Republicans’ 101 in the midterms, had 99 members show up to be sworn in Tuesday — while Republicans had 101.

The day after Election Day, with votes still being counted, Democrats said they had won the majority — and referred to their leader, McClinton as the incoming speaker of the House. Heading into Tuesday, Democrats were unified in saying that McClinton was their choice.

“We all came out here to Harrisburg to elect Joanna McClinton as our speaker,” one House Democrat said Tuesday evening.

Republicans wanted to maintain the majority — for however long they have it. In their best-case scenario, GOP lawmakers would have rallied around one candidate for speaker, postponed the special elections until the May primary, and maintained the majority until then.

After striking a deal with Democrats last month that took moving the special elections off the table, Republicans had to find a member of their own caucus that all of its members would support if they wanted to maintain power — or start looking for a Democrat they could convince to change parties.

» READ MORE: Pennsylvania lawmakers' election a new House speaker could be messy

The vote for Rozzi for speaker was a surprise to the public and even to lawmakers — and while it’s not clear how it happened, it has all the markings of a Harrisburg deal.

Rep. Jim Gregory (R., Blair) nominated Rozzi as speaker. Rep. Tim O’Neal — the House GOP whip — then seconded the nomination. McClinton then said she supported the nomination.

The vote was 115 to 85 for Rozzi over Rep. Carl Walker Metzgar (R., Somerset).

Legislative leaders, including Cutler, were among the Republicans who voted for Rozzi, a likely sign that they were in on a deal.

That’s part of why Tuesday’s vote was so shocking to so many: Republicans do have more members than Democrats in the state House, so the GOP had seemed the odds-on favorite to take the speaker’s gavel. If each party had put up a candidate for speaker, a party-line vote would have given Republicans the win.

In fact, Republicans demonstrated their numbers right before the vote for speaker. After Rozzi was nominated, the clerk — who was presiding — said nominations were closed. Cutler pushed back because a Republican member was attempting to also nominate Metzgar.

In a party-line vote, Republicans voted 101-99 to overturn the clerk’s decision that nominations were closed, opening them again so Metzgar could be nominated.

The fact that Republicans did not flex their short-term majority likely suggests Republicans could not rally around one single candidate for speaker. Prior to Tuesday’s vote, several GOP lawmakers circulated their names as candidates for speaker.

» READ MORE: Democrats won a majority of seats in the Pa. House for the first time in 12 years

We’re not sure. The question of which party has the speaker’s gavel is different from which party has the majority — and the vote for Rozzi might actually have complicated things even more.

The speaker is an institutional role, and technically doesn’t have to come from the majority party. That happened in 2007, for example, when Dennis M. O’Brien, a Philadelphia Republican, was elected as speaker even though Democrats had a majority of the members.

So Rozzi being elected speaker doesn’t resolve the question of majority control. For weeks now Cutler has said he’s the majority leader because there are more Republicans than Democrats, while McClinton has said she’s the majority leader because Democrats won more seats.

And this might even get more complicated: If Rozzi leaves the Democrats, it’s possible neither party ends up with a majority once special elections are held to fill the current three vacancies.