New presidents like to get off to a fast start; journalists speak of “the first hundred days.”
President-elect Trump has big plans: For taxes, restructuring government, finishing his border wall, and rounding up immigrants, among other things. And, it increasingly appears, taking another Republican run at destroying Medicare and Social Security, the premiere social welfare program that conservatives have hated since Day One.
But much of what he wants to do requires congressional approval. He has a fairly comfortable vote margin in the Senate, 53-47, although possibly not enough to confirm his worst cabinet and other nominees. But it’s a different story in the House of Representatives. There, his biggest and most controversial plans could face a brick wall. Let’s talk about that.
First of all, there was no “red wave” in the 2024 House elections accompanying Trump’s re-election. In fact, Republicans lost a seat (details here). That leaves them, on paper, with a 220-215 margin. But Speaker Johnson will lose 3 of his members in January: Controversial Rep. Matt Gaetz resigned, and 2 others are leaving for Trump administration jobs.
Although all 3 of these seats are in safe Republican districts, it will be April at the earliest before they’re filled by special elections. For the first 100 days, then, Johnson has a 217-215 majority.
In the Senate, the vice president can break a tie vote in favor of the administration. But not so in the House; there, a tie vote means legislation fails to pass. This means if even one Republican member breaks ranks, or is out sick, or held up by a delayed flight to Washington D.C., the Democrats can defeat major legislation if they have all their members present. And they will make great efforts to do so.
Now let’s look at Rep. Dan Newhouse, a Republican from eastern Washington. Of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for the Jan. 6 insurrection, Newhouse is the last one still in the House. Back home in his district, he needs Democratic voters to get re-elected.
Republicans outnumber Democrats about 2-to-1 in Newhouse’s district. But his district includes the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, which means he has a lot of constituents who are highly educated professionals: Scientists, engineers, managers, and others. His #1 priority is getting funding for the continued cleanup of Hanford’s nuclear waste. That’s a top priority of Washington’s Democrat-run state government, too.
There’s more. Thanks to Washington’s “top two” primary election system, in 2024 both candidates for Newhouse’s seat were Republicans. Newhouse came in a distant second in the primary, but that was good enough to get on the November ballot. And that’s all he needed to do to get re-elected.
Here’s the math: His district’s Democratic voters, given a choice between two Republicans, will vote for the least extreme of them. That’s Newhouse. Assuming he gets all, or nearly all, of the Democratic vote, he only needs a third of the Republican vote. (33% of 66% = 22%; then, 33% + 22% = 55%; in fact, he got 52%).
That means he can piss off two-thirds of his Republican constituents by refusing to toe the MAGA line in Congress, and still get re-elected. On the other hand, if he votes to do serious damage to federal spending, Medicare and Social Security, etc., he’ll lose the Democratic voters he needs to get re-elected.
It should be pretty obvious to anyone who can do political math where there is going. Speaker Johnson doesn’t have Newhouse’s vote for the most ambitious, and controversial, of Trump’s legislative asks. Big pieces of Project 2025, for example. Or Elon Musk’s draconian spending cuts. Or messing with Social Security and Medicare.
Eventually the speaker will get back those 3 seats, and Newhouse won’t hold the deciding vote anymore. That’s a few months after the next Congress convenes. But Newhouse isn’t alone in not being a rubberstamp for Trump’s agenda.
I don’t know, off the top of my head, exactly how many other GOP representatives are from districts Trump lost or otherwise are considered “purple” or competitive. But I’m pretty sure there are some others who, like Newhouse, are unlikely to go along with the most extreme GOP agenda items.
In Congress, numbers matter. You either have a majority for a tax plan, spending bill, or other lawmaking — or you don’t. Speaker Johnson himself admits his side “has nothing to spare” when Congress reconvenes in January (see story here).
That should mean, and is likely to mean, that Project 2025 will never make it out of the House. And Newhouse’s constituents, among others, should let him know in no uncertain terms that it better not.