Welcome to the 119th Congress
It's all the fun of the 118th, just with unified government, reconciliation, and Elon Musk!
I was going to write a detailed prospective piece today on the “political dynamics of the 119th Congress,” but yesterday’s collapse of the Continuing Resolution featured so many of those dynamics that “prospective” doesn’t really makes sense this morning. We are now living in the 119th Congress for all intents and purposes. Might as well talk about it that way.
To briefly zoom out, the key institutional features of the 119th Congress are: (1) unified GOP government; (2) a very narrow majority in the House; (3) a factional split among the House Republicans that has taken the balance of power away from the party leadership and continually threatens to topple the Speaker; (4) a president whose legislative approach is both different than almost all other modern presidents and also aggressively chaotic; and (5) a rapidly changing media/political environment that continues to empower backbenchers more than ever and also drive more legislative politics into the public sphere.
Unified government really is the most important feature. Just as it was easy to see how divided government was going to affect the 118th Congress (lots of gridlock, not a whole lot of major legislation, zero party-line legislating, lots of judges in the Senate, lots of investigations in the House, lots of clown-car stunts in both chambers because there’s nothing else to do), unified GOP government will broadly structure the 119th.
Most importantly, it unlocks a realistic potential for party-line legislating, because the majority party can use the reconciliation process to bypass the filibuster on budgetary-related legislation, assuming they can agree amongst themselves on a budget resolution, reconciliation instructions, and the actual legislation. This is a tantalizing prize, and there’s no chance the GOP won’t try it. The last 5 presidencies have started with unified government, and all of them have tried to do some party-line legislating in this manner. Sometimes it fails (ACA repeal 2017), sometimes it succeeds (TCJA 2017, ARPA 2021, IRA 2022), but it is absolutely where we are headed.
Unified government also has the feature of largely shutting the minority out of oversight. The bulk of the oversight authority doesn’t really adhere to individual members. Instead, it’s controlled by the chambers and delegated to the committees. Without control of either chamber, the congressional Democrats won’t have much institutional capacity to oversee/investigate the Trump administration for the next two years.
Of course, unified government was the one piece of the 119th Congress not on display yesterday, as the Democrats still control the Senate until January 3rd.
Sometimes we oversell ideas like a “narrow majority” but not this time. The margin on January 3rd will be 219-215 (Matt Gaetz having resigned), and will slump to 217-215 once Representatives Stefanik and Waltz join the Trump administration, before beginning to rebound with the special election in Florida at the end of January. There’s so little room to maneuver and less hope than ever for cross-over partisan votes that the GOP House leadership is going to have the double headache of not only having to count every last vote, but also having to whip perfect attendance at times.
In theory, the narrow majority in the House should be less of a problem in the 119th Congress than the 118th. Unified government has a way of focusing the partisan mind, and a lot of the circus in the 118th House could be rationalized as a byproduct of having nothing serious to do. It’s not like turning the guns on each other cost the GOP some huge policy prize they could have had. Next year, there is going to be intense pressure on people from the administration and the conservative policy ecosystem to fall in line on the budget resolution and the reconciliation instructions and the reconciliation bills. With something actually on the line, “go along to get along” has a lot of pull. In turn, the tolerance of the big players for the circus stunts and leadership fights should be significantly less. If you squint, you can see how everyone has an incentive to work together.
In practice, it could still be a total train wreck, and almost certainly will be at least a slog. For one, the margins are going to be so narrow in the House in January that even if you literally get 99% of the conference to fall in line no questions asked, any one asshole and his friend can still derail you. By April it will be one asshole and her two buddies. And in the House of Representatives—just like at the PTA meeting—there’s always at least one asshole.
One problem is everyone has gotten a taste in the 118th of how easy it is to wield the balance of power, at least if your goal is to blow shit up and pick fights with the leadership. The HFC crowd didn’t accomplish anything from a policy/substantive point of view; heck, the main policy result of their temper-tantrums was that a whole variety of bills moved to the left. But the reconciliation bills aren’t moving to the left, they’re either happening or they aren’t. And a lot of people might start wondering if blowing shit up could actually be a path to moving stuff their direction. And a fair amount of people in the House GOP have a basic political outlook that blowing shit up is good.
And this is the core dilemma. The balance of power in the House GOP is held by people for whom blowing shit up is their basic political outlook. They don’t compromise. You either give them what they want or they vote no. That’s not really an issue when they are a faction of the minority. It’s frustrating when they grumpy outliers in the majority. It’s chaotic when you have a narrow majority in divided government. But when you have a narrow majority in a unified government and want to do party line legislating, it forces the issue. They either have to fold and go along and join the real world of compromise, or they have to blow up the party program.
For a while now, I think it’s been clear that the media ecosystem surrounding the GOP has created terrible incentives for the party, because there’s a basic media business interest on the right to be out of power. Everything sells better as complaint, the internal logic of populism works much better from out of power, and governing is too hard and complicated and compromise-y anyway for shock outrage. And a non-trivial portion of GOP House members (and some Dems, to be fair) have internalized the political style that comports to these incentives. It’s not just a matter of style over substance and a lack of seriousness about governing, it’s an entire approach to legislative politics. Just a heck of lot of people more comfortable in the trappings of the 118th Congress than the 119th.
One thing the narrow House majority is going to guarantee is that the Speaker is not going to have unilateral control over the Rules Committee, and the leadership is not going to be able to assume party loyalty on rules votes on the floor. The minimum requirement for Johnson to stay Speaker will be for the HFC folks on Rules to keep their seats. That’s the new baseline. Which is wild, because the old way to get on Rules was to be a blind loyalist to leadership. Now you are better off threatening to depose them.
Right up until yesterday, I thought Johnson was in good shape to retain the Speakership. Winning the election seemed to quiet the critics, the prospect of unified government seemed like it might be suppressing the appetite to blow shit up from the right, and Trump seemed ready to back Johnson in a way that made his fraught lame-duck path through the CR and NDAA and Farm Bill and Disaster Relief navigable. And seriously, who the hell else actually wants that job?
Johnson seems more on the ropes than ever, all of a sudden. Representative Massie is out publicly against him for Speaker. A pile of HFC types are non-committal. Chip Roy is screaming about going to the mat for deficit reduction. Victoria Spartz is saying crazy shit about leaving the party. Everyone hates Johnson’s CR that turned into a 1,500 page Christmas tree. Various committee chairs are saying/pretending they never were involved with it. Elon Musk spent the entire day trashing the bill and endorsing a government shutdown. And by late afternoon, Trump and Vance had come out against it, but now want to raise the debt limit ASAP.
One thing Johnson has working for him is that there is going to be significant pressure to wrap the Speaker election up fast. The election will be Friday, January 3rd, and looming on Monday is the counting of the electoral votes. While it is totally possible to use work-arounds to count the votes before settling on a permanent speaker, I don’t think Trump has any interest in messing with the count. And so there’s going to be a lot of pressure to coordinate on someone without a protracted fight. Could that be Tom Emmer? Sure. But it feels like it puts a light thumb on the scale for Johnson. And do we really want to staff up a brand-new Speaker on the fly, right as we are trying to get out of the gate legislatively? I can hear that argument bouncing around HC-5 as well.
One key problem yesterday—and for the Speaker fight—is that Trump just doesn’t seem to have a clue how to be helpful in legislative politics. He must know that he has a lot of influence among the House GOP, but he repeatedly refuses to use it preemptively. This can be helpful at times when he’s trying to keep his hands off things and let others take blame. But his m.o. is to swoop in after the deals have been made and blindside his own party by trashing the compromise they came out with. He did this on ACA repeal, he did it repeatedly on taxes, he did it on the shutdown CR in 2018, he did on NDAA in 2020, he does it on everything. If he had just laid out his position at Thanksgiving—maybe ”clean-ish CR, with disaster relief, with farm bill extension, etc.”—the House GOP would have absolutely passed that bill and then Johnson and company could have negotiated a decent deal with the Senate and moved on. Heck, he could have demanded debt limit too and probably gotten to a good spot. But he doesn’t signal this stuff and so it’s all aimless until he comes in and wrecks it.
The CR yesterday was a Christmas tree of epic proportions and I’m not at all surprised it collapsed. But it was partially a Christmas tree because of the brutal party politics of the House GOP and the absence of Trump leadership. We are going 15 years on a basic dilemma for House GOP leadership: the right wing will not vote for any spending bills except the most extreme conservative outlier bills that can’t possibly pass and often can’t even get the moderate GOP on board. This means the House GOP leadership can’t even get to a bargaining position for the party. Since it’s must-pass legislation and their job is to pass it, they only thing they can do is go negotiate with the Democrats, who obviously take the opportunity to demand a whole raft of goodies, which in turn ignites the conservative media ecosystem and lets the HFC say “I told you these leaders were RINOs”. Rinse and repeat since 2011. The stakes have been upped in the 118th (and 119th) because the HFC has the balance of power and the willingness to tank rules. So the leadership can only bring these CRs to the floor as suspension bills, which require 2/3 majority to pass in the House, which means they really have to be bipartisan efforts.
All that said, that was still a ridiculous CR. I knew it was in trouble as soon as I saw the Member pay raise provisions. Congress hasn’t gotten a pay raise since 2009—they keep affirmatively blocking it because the politics of it are so awful—and this is the moment they decided to go for it? I don’t think there’s anything in legislative politics that fires up voters more than the pay raise issue. They fucking hate it. And the Members know it. When I was at House Appropriations, the pay raise was kinda in my wheelhouse—I did the Legislative Branch bill, which isn’t technically where it is, but everything sort of thinks it is because it makes sense—and I never met a Member who didn’t think everyone on the Hill—Members, political staff, non-political staff—should be paid better. But I also never met a Member who wanted to champion it. It’s just brutal politics.
Enter Elon Musk. I’m not even quite sure how to talk about his role in everything yesterday, because I can’t really come up with anything remotely analogous to it. He got on social media and started whipping against the CR from an HFC / populist angle, and it just seemed like was really effective. To recap: the richest man in the world was on social media retweeting everything from legitimate complaints about the CR to completely made-up populist nonsense, and it seemed like it had an important effect on the politics. There’s a behavioral economics to legislative politics—in the sense that the constructed reality of what the Members believe might cause them to lose reelection ends up creating the actual reality more than what might actually cause them to lose reelection—and my read on this is that Musk’s whipping against the bill was second only to Trump coming out against it in influence.
The new House GOP Policy Committee Chair I compared Musk to a stoned 10th grader yesterday, and from a substantive point of view, that’s what he is. Heavy on complaints, light on solutions. And just fundamentally unserious about policy—at one point he suggested the best course of action was to just shut down the government till January 20th. It’s just pure outrage machine. That doesn’t mean it isn’t influential. But it’s not the work of anyone actually interested in governance.
I don’t think the Musk-Trump relationship can last very long in the current format. Trump’s ego alone will probably not be able to take too many instances of the Dems (and some Republicans!) using the term “President Musk” like they did yesterday. But beyond that, Musk very much seems like a force on the side of blowing shit up, and as much as people like to ascribe that to Trump, I think the context of the 119th Congress, Trump is going to very much want to get the party discipline that allows for a unified government to act. Whatever else Musk was up to yesterday, he was blowing shit up. As mentioned earlier, the last thing the GOP needs next year is another influential voice driven by blowing shit up.
I have no idea how you politically break up with Elon Musk without creating a headache as big, or bigger, than the one you start with.
Will there be a shutdown? I mean, who the fuck knows—you should definitely get nervous when Tom Cole isn’t saying there won’t be—but I’d bet against any sort of extended shutdown. As Jonathan Bernstein likes to say, shutdowns only happen if somebody really wants one. I don’t think the GOP wants one right now. Musk and Trump have left the Hill GOP in the lurch and I’m not convinced they will be able to get a deal across by Friday at midnight—which would trigger a lapse in appropriations—but an actual shutdown wouldn’t begin in any real sense until Monday morning, and that extra 48 hours is probably enough to cobble something together. Here’s my old explainer on all things shutdown if you are seriously bored today.
Trump’s alternative to the CR sounds like tough sledding at first glance—a clean-ish CR with disaster relief and the farm bill extension, but throw the debt-limit in? That would indeed be a true test of Trump’s influence on the GOP. The whole notion of threatening to primary anyone who doesn’t vote for a debt limit increase feels like we’re living in some bizzarro world. Up until yesterday, the more common formulation on the right was to threaten to primary anyone who does vote for a debt-limit increase! And count me skeptical that you could actually lose your Republican seat to a right-wing opponent whose case against you was that you voted against raising the debt limit. But again, the consequence of the threat has more to do with the behavior economics of the GOP conference than any electoral reality, and they do tend to be risk-averse in crossing Trump. But I’ll believe it when I see it that the House GOP gets 200 votes to increase/suspend the debt limit.
One strategy is to try to rope the Democrats into supporting the new bill. The Dems definitely don’t want a shutdown, and setting up a clean-ish CR + disaster + Farm Bill + debt limit would be hard for the Dems to vote no on, just on partisan principle as payback for abandoning the compromise. But it’s also the bill that the GOP has relied on massive Dem votes to pass in the past, and it would be absolute malpractice for Jeffries to carry the debt limit without demanding either some goodies, or that the GOP provide 200 votes. I don’t think the GOP can carry a rule right now to get to this, so blaming the Dems for a shutdown sure seems like a trick needle to thread.
We should abolish the debt limit. Since we owe the debt either way on the difference between revenue and expenditures, the only possible beneficial purpose the debt limit can serve is to constrain Treasury from issuing debt above and beyond what is necessary. But since the common practice nowadays is to suspend the debt limit rather than increase it, we don’t even get that benefit. And the political nonsense attached to raising/suspending it—-to say nothing of the actual risk of a default/breech crisis—is a clear negative. The Dems should just push to abolish it in this deal. The HFC and the populists would scream, but I actually think Trump might go for it.
Why exactly are these "must pass" bills? This seems to be an implicit value judgment that even a horrible bill is better than inaction. From a game theory standpoint this does not seem to be necessarily true. The partisan impact of shutdowns/debt ceiling showdowns historically is mixed at worst for Republicans in my opinion.
The Republicans arguably benefitted from the long shutdown in the mid-90s. Clinton basically caved and passed welfare reform. The brinksmanship during the Obama administration won the Republicans the Budget Control Act. While Trump did not win his border wall during his first term shutdown the costly signalling of enabling the shutdown reinforced his immigration hardliner bonafides with the public and might have helped him get reelected in 2024.
If anything the Republicans have an incentive to play even harder ball on the shutdown negotiations. The fact that the GOP leadership now almost always caves to the Democrats' key demands gives credence to the "RINO" charge.
The vast majority of the federal government bureaucrats who would face the financial pain of potential furloughs during a lengthy shutdown are urban, college educated Democrats (the antithesis of the Republican base). A sizable portion of the Republican base despises the federal government and would love nothing more than to see it shuttered and to revel in the schadenfraude of the bureaucrats they blame for their declining standard of living themselves face financial precarity and the spectre of potential unemployment. This should give the GOP establishment negotiators "good cop/bad cop" leverage, but they perenially refuse to use it.
Excellent post, and regarding your very last point, I don't get the sense that Dems are talking enough right now about abolishing the debt limit. I wish I knew why.