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WASHINGTON (AP) – President-elect Joe Biden’s The decision to bring in multiple House Democrats for administrative posts puts President Nancy Pelosi in a politically difficult situation, having chiseled the party’s already thinning majority and potentially leaving her without enough votes to pass her legislative platform.
Democrats were already heading to the new Congress with a razor thin margin on Republicans. But Biden’s opening up to a third lawmaker, Representative Deb Haaland, DN.M., as the first Native American Home Secretary to make history, spark a new round of painful conversations about what to do. Pelosi will start the Biden era with a slim majority, 222-211, with a few races still undecided.
But Pelosi’s management team has a plan.
“We have to deal with something like this,” said Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina, the Democratic whip and one of Biden’s main allies, in an interview with The Associated Press this week.
According to Clyburn, an emerging strategy is to stagger confirmations: Biden would delay formally submitting nominations at the same time so that house numbers don’t immediately drop.
According to the plan, the timeline would unfold in the first few months of the new Congress, ample time for the House to pass the 100-day agenda, a generally important but symbolic legislative sprint that takes on new presidency-aligned importance. by Biden.
Biden’s first choice in the House, Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-La., Would quickly join the administration once the president-elect is inaugurated on January 20, Clyburn said. Richmond is set to become a senior adviser, a position that does not require confirmation by the Senate.
Biden would then wait to nominate the other two candidates, Haaland and Rep. Marcia Fudge, D-Ohio, who was named housing secretary, until the March special election in Louisiana to take the Richmond seat.
Lawmakers can stay in the House, voting as members, until confirmed by the Senate. Their applications could be sent one after the other, in the following months.
“You just have to manage it,” Clyburn said.
All three House seats are in Democratic strongholds and should be closed to Republicans. But special elections can throw curves, and the staggered schedule would also give campaigns a lot of leeway to support candidates and races.
Democrats are already immersed in political soul-searching after dismal November outcome for House Democrats. Biden’s win had short tails as they lost seats and have seen their majority decrease.
Moderate lawmakers and strategists accused progressives of pushing the party message too far to the left; progressives have complained that it was the centrists who waged timid campaigns without a bold message to attract voters.
Pelosi is a main voting booth on the House floor, but even his skills will be tested in the new Congress, starting with his own election to another term as president. If even a few Democratic lawmakers oppose or withdraw, it could be difficult to pass bills in the new Congress.
In an extreme scenario, Republicans might even try to wrest control from the hammer and the majority. If the numbers drop so low – with illnesses or other absences, which are likely during the COVID-19 crisis – Republicans could try to force a floor vote on the issue.
Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., Said on Friday that the departures of the three lawmakers would combine with existing divisions among Democrats to make government “very difficult” for Pelosi.
“In a given vote, when your margin is as narrow as this, a few people may get mad at something totally unrelated to the vote and come after you,” Cole said.
The danger zone was close enough that House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer warned Biden last month not to remove more Democrats from his ranks.
“I thought it would be difficult if, in fact, members of Congress were selected,” Hoyer told reporters this week. “The margin was very close.”
A similar scenario unfolded in the Senate, where Biden refrained from appointing senators to administrative positions due to the GOP’s tight grip.
The Senate split will be 51-48 when the new Congress is sworn in on Jan. 3, with a majority not yet decided until two Jan. 5 polls in Georgia.. One of the two rounds involves a sitting Republican senator.
In some ways, the tightly-divided House could provide Biden with an opportunity to step across the aisle and try to strike bipartisan deals with a centrist agenda that might attract some Republicans.
But so far House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy has signaled a move in the opposite direction. He wants to use the floor procedures as a political weapon to weigh down bills with Republican priorities and force vulnerable Democrats to tough votes.
Republicans have used the strategy with some success in the current session of Congress, producing campaign ads against Democrats seeking re-election. McCarthy, his own attempt to grab the Republicans majority in 2022 now at hand, warned shortly after the November election that there would be more ground battles to come.
McCarthy said if Republicans don’t have a majority in the New Year, they will “run the floor.”
To block those efforts, Democrats are considering rule changes proposed by Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla., Which would raise the threshold for those votes to a two-thirds majority to make it harder for Republicans to change bills. .
Still, the first legislation of the new Congress may not be too difficult for Pelosi to pass, even with a slimmer majority.
The agenda will likely be rooted in HR 1 through HR9 – the first nine bills from the last Congress – popular democratic measures on the right to vote, lowering prescription drug prices, increasing the minimum wage and background checks for gun purchases that most Democrats already have. voted for.
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Associated Press writer Alan Fram contributed to this report.
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