Clerk of the House of Representatives

Clerk of the United States House of Representatives
Incumbent Karen L. Haas since January 5, 2011
Style	Madam Clerk
Appointer	Elected by the House
Term length	Pleasure of the House (nominally a two-year Congress)
Inaugural holder	John Beckley
Website	Office of the Clerk

The Clerk of the United States House of Representatives is an officer of the United States House of Representatives, whose primary duty is to act as the chief record-keeper for the House.

Along with the other House officers, the Clerk is elected every two years when the House organizes for a new Congress. The majority and minority caucuses nominate candidates for the House officer positions after the election of the Speaker. The full House adopts a resolution to elect the officers, who will begin serving after they have taken the oath of office.

The current Clerk is Karen L. Haas, of Maryland. She replaced Lorraine C. Miller at the beginning of the 112th Congress. Robert Reeves is Deputy Clerk and Gigi Kelaher is Senior Advisor to the Clerk.

The Constitution of the United States states in Article 1, Section 2, “The House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker and other Officers...” On April 1, 1789, when the House of Representatives convened with its first quorum, its initial order of business was the election of the Speaker, Frederick Augustus Conrad Muhlenberg, a Representative from Pennsylvania. The next order of business was the election of the Clerk, John Beckley, Esquire, a citizen of Virginia.

The first five Clerks of the House also served as Librarian of Congress, which became a separate position in 1815. South Trimble, a former Representative from Kentucky, who served as Clerk from 1911 to 1919 and again from 1931 to 1946, is the longest-tenured Clerk in House history.

Every two years regular congressional elections are held. Only one-third of Senators' terms expire at each of these elections, but the terms of office of the entire House end. The Senate has remained in constant existence since it first went into session in 1789 but the House goes out of existence (and hence a "new" Congress takes office) every two years. To preserve the legal continuity of the House, the existence of the House is vested in the Clerk at the end of each two-year term. Thus, when the newly elected members of the House gather on January 3, it is the Clerk who summons Representatives and convenes the new Congress for the first time. Accordingly, the Clerk gavels the House into session, chairs the body as it adopts its rules of order, and oversees the election of a Speaker under those rules. The Speaker then takes the chair and the House proceeds with its business (which includes electing a Clerk for the new session). Were the House not to vest such personality in the Clerk, there would be no legally empowered authority to convene the session and lead the House in its first few acts.