3 days ago

House Republicans’ Vote Margin Is Looking Pret-ty Thin Right Now

WASHINGTON — In the span of a few hours, House Republican leaders just watched their already narrow vote margin slip to about as weak as it can get.

A day after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) resignation from Congress took effect, news broke early Tuesday that Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-Calif.) had suddenly died at the age of 65. Then, more news broke that another Republican congressman, 80-year-old Jim Baird of Indiana, was in the hospital after a car crash.

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The House, which has 435 members when every seat is filled, has already been operating with two empty seats. Sylvester Turner (D-Texas) died last March, and Mikie Sherrill (D-N.J.) resigned in November after becoming her state’s governor.

Now, with Greene gone, LaMalfa dead, and Baird in the hospital, the House will have a total of 430 members in attendance, at most. That breaks down to 217 Republicans and 213 Democrats. Assuming all 430 show up for every vote, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) will need a majority of them, or at least 216, to vote his way.

Put another way, Johnson can only afford to lose one vote on anything. And that’s assuming all members are present and all other Republicans vote his way.

It’s a grim situation for the speaker, who has already spent the past year being routinely rebuked by GOP colleagues who teamed up with Democrats to force votes on bills he didn’t want to bring up, not the least of which was legislation to force Trump’s Justice Department to release all of its files on the late child *** trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

“I have not lost control of the House,” Johnson declared last month, as moderate Republicans went around him to force a vote to extend soon-to-expire Affordable Care Act subsidies.

Oy vey. Speaker Mike Johnson has a shrinking margin for votes in the House.

President Donald Trump brought up Republicans’ tight new vote margin during remarks at the Kennedy Center on Tuesday.

Baird and his wife “had a pretty bad accident and we’re praying that they get out of the hospital very quickly,” Trump said. As for the GOP’s shrinking vote margin, the president said, “It’s not a big majority but it is a unified majority and it’s people that know what it takes to make America great again.”

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The math of House votes can be illusory. Some Republicans routinely talk tough about opposing Johnson on key votes, but then cave in the end (we see you, Rep. Victoria Spartz). Some are only willing to buck Johnson if their vote doesn’t decide a bill’s outcome.

The only Republican who has reliably said he’ll vote no on something and then actually does it is Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who has been a thorn in both Johnson’s and Trump’s side. His vote also just became significantly more crucial in the House.

Trump didn’t do himself any favors by attacking Massie on Monday. In a social media post, the president re-upped his endorsement of a primary challenger to the Kentucky lawmaker and called Massie “the Worst ‘Republican’ Congressman we have had in many years.”

Massie responded by sharing the president’s post and mocking it: “i ain’t reading all that. im happy for u tho or sorry that happened,” he wrote Tuesday on social media.

Democrats will elect someone to Turner’s former House seat in a runoff election on Jan. 31. With that seat filled, and presuming Baird is back in the House by then, the new House total would be 432 members. But the tiny vote margin will be the same: with 218 Republicans and 214 Democrats, Johnson still can’t afford to lose more than one vote.