With Representative Mike Garcia’s win in California’s 27th district, Republicans have won their 218th seat.
More than a week after Election Day, Republicans appear to have finally clinched enough seats to narrowly win back control of the U.S. House of Representatives, setting up the chamber to serve as a political foil for President Joe Biden for at least the next two years, and giving the GOP the opportunity to begin setting its playing field ahead of the critical 2024 campaign.
But with such a razor thin majority, California Representative Kevin McCarthy, the Republican nominee for House speaker, will have little room to maneuver, and he will likely be vulnerable to challenges from members from his left and his right who disapprove of his leadership.
“You don’t have any margin for error when the numbers are this small, and smaller groups of people can demand to be treated as negotiating factions,” said Matt Glassman, senior fellow at the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown University.
“Right now, trying to govern the Republicans on a small margin in the House, it just feels like a ticket to an exit from D.C.,” he added. “I don’t get the sense that McCarthy is going to have a pleasant time trying to wrangle the circus.”
In the lead up to Election Day, some strategists suggested that Republicans could pick up 20, and possibly more than 30 House seats. But it quickly became clear Tuesday night that Republicans underperformed. With Republican Representative Mike Garcia’s win in California’s 27th congressional district on Wednesday, Republicans appeared to have won their 218th seat, the number needed to control the 435-seat chamber, according to a projection by the Associated Press.
The results were slow in coming, in part because of a slew of tight races around the country and slow vote counting in western states, including California, Arizona, and Nevada.
Democrats will maintain control of the Senate after incumbent Catherine Cortez Masto was declared the winner over Republican Adam Laxalt in Nevada on Saturday. Republicans could keep a 50-50 tie in the Senate if Republican Herschel Walker is able to flip a seat in a December yet another Georgia runoff, but Vice President Kamala Harris will serve as the tie-breaker.
With control of the House, Republicans are expected to use their power to try to block much of Biden’s remaining agenda. They are also expected to cast a more watchful eye on federal spending, wield their oversight authority, and launch investigations into things like: Covid-19’s origins, the politicization of the FBI, the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, gas prices, and the continued crisis at the southern border.
The Republican House may also try to pass legislation intended to fight inflation, secure the border, re-establish American energy independence, support the hiring of more police officers, confront Big Tech, and ween the country off its dependence on China. But with Democrats in control of the Senate and the presidency, most Republican legislation will go nowhere. And with such a narrow majority, McCarthy may have to shrink his agenda and focus his efforts only on legislation that will get broad Republican support, including from moderates and members to his right.
In many cases, Glassman said, lawmakers are okay with allowing a measure they disagree with to pass, as long as they can vote against it. “But if you have 220 seats in the House, you’re going to need all of them all the time,” he said.
“The baseline assumption should always be that the status quo is going to persist, and that will be the Trump tax cuts. It will also be the Inflation Reduction Act,” Glassman said.
Even though Biden likely won’t sign Republican-backed legislation, it can still serve as a Republican road map for 2024, said Jessica Anderson, executive director of Heritage Action for America, a conservative advocacy organization. House Republicans will have two years to “tee up their best legislation, and get all the kinks out,” she said.
Glassman concurred, saying he expects the House will pass legislation that “will go nowhere in the Senate, and that stuff will be looked at by outsiders – media, voters – as what Republican governing would look like.” But, he noted, that legislation could be somewhat misleading as a general Republican platform. “When you know something is not going anywhere it gives you sort of a wider berth of how you think about things. It’s a lot easier to pass legislation without having to think about implementation or blowback to it.”
McCarthy has said that spending cuts would be a priority if Republicans won the House, and that he would be open to using negotiations over appropriations bills and the debt limit to win concessions. Another priority, McCarthy has said, is blocking the IRS from receiving $80 billion in new funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, money that would be used to hire tens-of-thousands of new staffers, including new auditors and enforcement agents. He has also indicated he wants more oversight over U.S. aid to Ukraine, stating that the U.S. wouldn’t provide a “blank check” to the country as it continues fighting off the Russian invasion.
Anderson, with Heritage Action, said that as chaos continues at the southern border, she believes House Republicans will use their power to pass a border security-bill while at the same time launching an impeachment probe of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
She also believes House Republicans will also take a new look at reforming entitlements – Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid – though she suspects much of that work will be done in committees. Because Trump did not prioritize that reform, Congress will need updated analyses, reports, and budgetary scores, she said. If Republicans are serious about reducing federal spending, “they’re going to have to look at entitlements,” Anderson said.
Without Senate control, Republicans will struggle to block Biden’s judicial nominees and cabinet appointees. Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell will continue to lead Senate Republicans, after he fended off a challenge from Florida Senator Rick Scott on Wednesday.
Without Republicans in control of the House, Glassman suspects Biden will resort to more unilateral, and possibly constitutionally-questionable executive orders, like his student-loan forgiveness plan, and his Covid-19 eviction moratorium, which was rejected by the Supreme Court.
“This is something I worry about, not because of Republicans or Democrats, but just generally,” he said. “In my view, Obama, Trump, Biden have all become more brazen with sort of trying to use unilateral executive authority to do things that 20 years ago none of us would have been on the merits okay with that the president could do unilaterally.”
“I think it’s a very bad development,” Glassman said, particularly in the realm of appropriations. “Absolutely I see potentially more of that.”