Cover photo: Rep. LaLota presents Speaker Johnson with Yankees jersey at a summer fundraiser in Nissequogue (Credit – Matt Meduri)
Republicans in Congress have successfully avoided a massive public relations nightmare by electing a Speaker on the first ballot, with relatively little intraparty fighting visible to the public.
The significance of this cannot be understated. Voters gave Donald Trump (R-FL) a clear win – while we won’t go as far as to classify it as a landslide, it was still a definitive win of historic proportions in many parts of the country – along with a Republican-led Senate and a Republican-led House. There wasn’t much of a question of leadership in the Senate. Not only did Republicans have their eyes on John Thune (R-SD) as the new Majority Leader over the clearly ailing and aged Mitch McConnell (R-KY), but, in relative terms, they have a
much more robust majority in their chamber than their counterparts in the House. Their 53-seat majority is the largest any party has had in the Senate since Republicans flipped four seats – for a net gain of two – in 2018. While not a massive majority, at least compared to Democrats’ 57-seat majority in 2008, it’s majority that will likely be more conducive to their agenda.
Republicans also successfully defended all of their seats in one cycle for the first time since 2014, which is somewhat owed to the rotation of seats up this year, but still speaks to the mandate nonetheless, in our opinion.
The House, on the other hand, has been decided by historically tenuous margins in each cycle since 2020. Republicans defied media expectations of a Democratic wave in the House to cement their 235-majority, only to leave Democrats clinging to a 222-seat quorum. Democrats returned the favor by defying the midterm curse and holding Republicans to an identical margin. This year, it was even thinner, with the GOP packing just a 220-seat majority.
The 2022 midterms were seen as wholly damaging to the GOP’s electoral prospects, as Democrats not only carried the single-issue banner of abortion across the finish line, but Trump-aligned or endorsed candidates lost easily winnable races. It was the left’s proof of concept that Trump, his allies, his surrogates, or even just his policies and persona, were unelectable. It’s what made them bullish on Harris and company’s prospects in 2024, but the momentum didn’t carry over.
Instead, Trump scored a historic win and perhaps the most extraordinary phoenix-from-the-ashes comeback this country has seen, at least politically, Republicans created a firm lock on the Senate that might be tough for Democrats to pick over the next couple of cycles, and a House majority, albeit a razor-thin one.
But in the interim, Republicans had a difficult time governing with the bare-bones majority voters gave them in 2022. It took fifteen ballots to elect Kevin McCarthy (R, CA-20) as speaker. For context, only fourteen other speaker elections required more than one ballot, thirteen of which occurred before the Civil War. The 68th Congress in 1923 was the last time it took more than one ballot to elect a speaker, and the 36th Congress in 1859 was the last time it took more than nine ballots to elect a speaker.
For context and trivia purposes, the record is 133 ballots during the 34th Congress in 1855, owing to sectional conflicts over slavery, anti-immigration, and the collapse of the Whig Party in favor of the nascent Republican Party.
In short, Republicans’ displays in January 2023 handed voters a difficult pill to swallow regarding their ability to govern and agree to disagree to keep the House in session. Republicans then committed another PR misstep in October 2023, by moving to vacate the Speaker’s chair – the first such occurrence in American history – a move which precipitated four rounds of votes until the GOP unified around Mike Johnson.
A big question going into this year was just how an even thinner Republican House majority would play out, especially with Trump’s populism coming to roost in a little over a week and intraparty fighting over a spending package to avert a government shutdown.
Despite these contentions, Johnson took the gavel on the first try, allowing the party to display that they can agree to disagree on some differences, especially when it means demonstrating to the American public their ability to manage themselves. After all, a party that can’t manage itself doesn’t exactly make a good case for managing the country.
But despite the obvious objections of certain party members, especially between those of the House Freedom Caucus and the more “establishment” wing of the party, it’s a breath of fresh air to see a party disagree.
That’s the point. Parties are supposed to disagree. They’re not supposed to toe every line and rubber stamp every bill. Disagreement and even discord, at times, is what drives genuine conversations and change. In a way, Republicans can also demonstrate strength through leading by example, as Americans are unlikely to agree on certain hot-button issues, but still need to keep the presses running and the lights on.
It’s also refreshing to see Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Elon Musk, Cenk Uygur – creator and host of The Young Turks, a progressive alternative media source – and Donald Trump, Jr., all agreeing on X, formerly known as Twitter, than that Pentagon requires some serious scrutiny. After failing massive audits for the better part of the last decade, it’s an unusual, and equally welcome, solution to solving our nation’s biggest problems.
We might not agree on everything, but putting away the 95% of items on which we disagree and working together to solve the 5% on which we do agree is an excellent start.
