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Republicans secured a 220-215 seat House majority on Tuesday, after California Rep. John Duarte conceded to Democrat Adam Gray. It’s the smallest advantage for one party since 1931 – and will be even smaller, just 217-215, until the three House Republicans nominated for roles in Donald Trump’s Cabinet are replaced in special elections.
“We know how to work with a small majority,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters on Wednesday morning. “We have nothing to spare.”
If and when Republicans fill the vacancies — they are favored to, in districts Trump carried easily last month — they will start his second presidency with far less running room than his first. The GOP held 241 House seats in January 2017, a cushion that allowed them to pass major legislation with significant defections.
Twelve House Republicans opposed final passage of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, some on fiscally conservative grounds, and some because of the effect a cap on state tax deductions would have on their constituents. Twenty Republicans voted against the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, which would end up being blocked by three Republican senators. (Two of them, Maine’s Susan Collins and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, remain in the chamber, and helped torpedo Trump’s initial nominee for attorney general last month.)
“Look, they probably have 18 months to legislate,” said Paul Ryan, the House Speaker for Trump’s first majority, at a post-election forum hosted by The Dispatch. “You cannot think that you’re going to keep these razor-thin majorities past 2026.”
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Until every vacancy is filled, any Republican can stop a bill from moving through the House, if every Democrat shows up and opposes it. But both parties will start the session more ideologically coherent than ever before.
In 2017, 25 House Republicans represented seats won by Hillary Clinton, giving Democrats a long list of 2018 targets — most of which they won. Based on the nearly-final vote count, just three House Republicans will hold seats carried by Vice President Harris last month: California’s David Valadao, Nebraska’s Don Bacon, and New York’s Mike Lawler. And retirements and red-to-blue flips have shrunk the number of Republicans who, in Trump’s first term, made problems for his agenda.
Of the 20 Republicans who voted against Obamacare repeal in the House, just five remain: Arizona’s Andy Biggs, Kentucky’s Tom Massie, Ohio’s David Joyce and Mike Turner, and Pennsylvania’s Mike Fitzpatrick. Seven have been replaced by Democrats. The rest have been succeeded by Republicans far less likely to break with Donald Trump, often in seats that grew more conservative, or were re-drawn to be less competitive, after 2020.
These newer members built their careers in a Trump-led GOP, and have rarely broken with the incoming president. North Carolina Rep. Greg Murphy replaced the late Walter Jones, an idiosyncratic anti-war conservative who opposed any bill that would increase the national debt; New York Rep. Dan Donovan, who lost in the 2018 wave, has been replaced by Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, who like Murphy voted to challenge the results of the 2020 election. Her Staten Island-based seat just isn’t competitive anymore; Trump won the borough by 15 points in 2016, and by 30 points last month.
“I think they’re going to overshoot on the policy, and go for many extreme things that will put guys like Mike Lawler in a very tough spot, and tags them all as toxic,” said C.J. Warnke, a spokesman for the Democrats’ House Majority PAC.
Notable
- In the Washington Post, Philip Bump points out that most members of the House, in both parties, arrived in D.C. with or after Donald Trump.