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Although the Constitution does not explicitly state that the Speaker of the House must be an elected member of the House, it is established custom that they should be. After all, how can you speak for a body of which you are not even a member? Also, the Constitution says that every member of the House must be chosen every second year by the PEOPLE of the States. This means that if the Speaker was not an elected Representative he could not be a member of the Chamber. Thus in theory if you elected a non-member of the House to be Speaker, then you would have a Speaker of the House that would not even a member of the House. That would be pretty awkward, though I suppose not impossible.

However, there is no time in US History of which I am aware, in which any state, or even colonial legislature for that matter, elected a non-member of their chamber to be their Speaker. So until it actually happens, it is only a theoretical possibility.

However, I would point out that if the House were able to elect a non-Representative to be their Speaker, then the Speaker would not have a vote in the Chamber since only elected Representatives are constitutionally allowed to be members of the Chamber as indicated by Art. I Sec.2 Par. 1 and 2 of the US Constitution which reads:

"The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States, and the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.

No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.

“The job of the Speakership is not dependent on being a sitting representative. It can be from within the ranks or outside the ranks.”

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.