FILE - In this March 20,2018, file photo, House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wis., pauses as he speaks to reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington. Ryan's political future as House speaker has been such a topic of speculation that even the simple question of whether he will seek re-election to his Wisconsin seat remains secret.  (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
Who will be the next speaker after Ryan?
00:56 - Source: CNN
CNN  — 

Are you in the market for a largely thankless job? Interested in being second in line for the presidency and are you really good at getting people to like you? If so, Congress might have a job for you!

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan announced on Wednesday that he won’t be seeking reelection, leaving one of the most powerful positions in the country up for grabs. And here’s the kicker: there are virtually no rules about who could be next. It could be you!

Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution simply says, “The House of Representatives shall chuse [sic] their Speaker and other Officers.”

Granted, history isn’t on your side. Never has the House elected a random citizen to be Speaker — that sounds like something out of an early aughts Adam Sandler movie, now that I think about it.

“They’ve always construed it to mean someone seated inside the House of Representatives,” National Constitution Center scholar Michael Gerhardt told CNN.

On Thursday, TMZ posted a video in which a reporter asks Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida on the rules about election of the Speaker.

“So any Joe Random? Kanye West? Anybody,” TMZ asked.

“Maybe. There’s got to be some requirement. Got to be a US citizen and all that kind of thing,” Rubio replied.

Rubio’s main concern was the idea of presidential succession. After the vice president, the speaker of the House is next in line to the presidency if the president isn’t able to serve.

Presidential succession on a good day is a sticky subject, even without random hypotheticals thrown in. The requirements to run for a House seat and to run for President are different. You only have to have been a citizen for seven years and be 25 or older to run for the House. (The youngest member of Congress, Rep. Elise Stefanik, was 32 when this session started.) Only natural born citizens who are are least 35 years old can run for president.

According to Gerhardt, even if we take a step back and only consider members of the House to be candidates for speaker, “Someone could be eligible to be speaker of the House, but not president.”

The youngest speaker of the House, Robert Hunter, was 30 when he took on the role. Even then, a century before the Presidential Succession Act, he was up there in the line of succession and too young to have been elected president in his own right. So it’s fine.

In theory, even if the House chose someone random to be speaker, members would choose a person eligible to be in the House in the first place — 25 or older and a US citizen. Sounds like a shadow campaign to be speaker is a really good way to avoid the drag of a legit congressional campaign, if you ask me. (You didn’t.)

For the record, Kanye West is 40 and was born in the US. And despite famously singing that “no one man should have all that power,” Kanye has flirted with the idea of a political run in the past. Strap on your Yeezys because — technically – he could warm up for a 2020 presidential run with a bid for speaker.

(But let’s be honest. We’re going to end up with a seasoned member from the majority party who is definitely old enough to be president.)