It might be — incredibly — too soon to say which party will control the House, but it’s not too soon to mark that if the GOP prevails, a fight may yet emerge in respect of who should be the Speaker. Ordinarily the shoo-in would be the minority leader in the lame duck House, Kevin McCarthy, but his prospects are, NBC and others report, already in jeopardy. The alternative favored by The New York Sun is Vice President Mike Pence.

We understand that Mr. Pence hasn’t thrown his hat in the ring. It would be, for one thing, a step down from Mr. Pence’s last office, Vice President, which put him first in the line of succession (the Speaker is second in line). Plus, at the moment, he is not even a member of the House. Then again, too, the Constitution doesn’t require the Speaker to be a member of the House. It says merely that “The House of Representatives shall choose their Speaker.”

By our lights, Mr. Pence is perfect for the job. He is one of the most competent and broadly experienced public officials. He served in the House itself, rising quickly to chairman of the Republican Conference and becoming an expert on the budget. He was governor of Indiana. As vice president in the Trump administration, he was a steady hand in a tumultuous term. On January 6, he emerged as a constitutional hero.

That was because of the way he kept his head and parried efforts of President Trump to get him to reject the vote count in key swing states. Mr. Pence consulted his own counsel and confined himself to carrying out his duty to, as the Constitution puts it, “open all the Certificates” of the states reporting their votes for president so that the votes could be counted. He also followed the procedures of the Electoral Count Act.

Mr. Pence’s own account of his actions that day are described in his memoir, “So Help Me God,” due out Tuesday and excerpted last week in the Wall Street Journal. His performance in the center of that riot was magnificent. When President Trump told him, “You’re not protecting our country, you’re supposed to support and defend our country!”, Mr. Pence retorted that what they both sworn to support and defend was the Constitution.

It’s hard to think of another vice president who was so severely tested as Mr. Pence was that day — or came out with such flying colors, praised by the Democrats as well as Republicans. Maybe John Adams, though that was before party politics. Or maybe John Calhoun, though the South Carolinian, who’d quit the vice presidency over nullification, had, as the editors of the Sun noted when he died, “pinned his faith to a sinking cause.”

Mike Pence’s performance on January 6 will be studied for generations as a marker of how the vice presidency itself is independent of the president. The vice president does not report to the president, cannot be instructed by the president, and cannot be fired by the president. Mr. Pence was one of the few persons who, though sought by the mob, refused to flee the Capitol — or even, lest he be spirited away, get into his limousine. 

All this discloses Mr. Pence as an extraordinary figure. To those who say that it’s unprecedented for the House, in choosing its Speaker, to go outside its own ranks, we would argue that doesn’t make it unconstitutional. The framers could have written that restriction into the Constitution had they wanted. The only limit they placed on choosing the Speaker is that it has to be done by the “House of Representatives.” No Senate approval needed.

By our lights, Mr. Pence has the ideal qualities in the next Speaker. If the GOP gains control, it will face all sorts of temptations on how to spend its political capital — particularly to mount a series of investigations of the Democrats. That should be left to the next attorney general. Mr. Pence is the right leader to lead the House to repair the economy along free market lines — and the dollar itself along the lines spelled out in the Constitution.