WASHINGTON (AP) – Joe Biden’s elected chairman The decision to recruit several House Democrats for administrative positions puts speaker Nancy Pelosi in a politically difficult situation, as she has chiselled out the party’s already declining majority and may not have enough votes to meet its legislative agenda.
Democrats were already on their way to the new Congress by a razor-thin margin about Republicans. But Biden’s overture to a third legislator, Rep. Deb Haaland, DN.M., as the first Native American Secretary of the Interior, starts another round of pained conversations about what to do. Pelosi starts the Biden era with a narrow majority, 222-211, with a few races still undecided.
But Pelosi’s leadership team has a plan.
“We have to get something like this done,” said Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina, the Democratic whip and a top ally of Biden, in an interview with The Associated Press this week.
According to Clyburn, an emerging strategy is to spread the confirmations: Biden would hold off on formally submitting the nominations all at once so that the house numbers don’t drop immediately.
According to the plan, the timing would unfold in the first few months of the new Congress, enough time for the House to meet the 100-day agenda, a typically important but symbolic legislative sprint that takes on new importance in line with Biden’s presidency. .
Biden’s first-choice House Representative Cedric Richmond, D-La., Would soon join the government once the president-elect is inaugurated on Jan. 20, Clyburn said. Richmond is on the verge of becoming a senior adviser, a position that does not need to be confirmed by the Senate.
Biden would then hold off submitting the other two nominees, Haaland and Rep. Marcia Fudge, D-Ohio, who was tapped as housing secretary until after the March special election in Louisiana to fill the Richmond seat.
The legislators can remain in the House and vote as members until they are confirmed in the Senate. Their nominations could be sent consecutively in the following months.
“Just sort it out,” said Clyburn.
The House’s three seats are located in Democratic strongholds and are expected to be off limits to Republicans. But special elections can produce curveballs, and the staggered timing would also give the campaigns plenty of leeway to support the candidates and races.
Democrats are already deep in the political soul-searching after a dismal November outcome for House Democrats. Biden’s win had short coats when she lost seats and saw their majority shrink.
Moderate lawmakers and strategists blamed progressives for pushing the party message too far to the left; progressives complained that they were centrists running timid campaigns without a bold message to attract voters.
Pelosi is a master of House floor voting, but even her skills will be tested in the new Congress, starting with her own election for another term as a speaker. If even a few Democratic lawmakers object or scrap it, it can be difficult to pass bills in the new Congress.
In an extreme scenario, Republicans could even try to take control of the gavel and the majority. If the numbers were to get so low – with illnesses or other absences, likely during the COVID-19 crisis – Republicans could try to vote on the ground on the matter.
Representative Tom Cole, R-Okla., Said Friday that the departure of the three lawmakers would be combined with the existing divisions among Democrats to make governing “very difficult” for Pelosi.
“In a particular vote, when your margin is as small as this, a few people can be angry with something completely unrelated to the vote and just turn it down on you,” Cole said.
The danger zone was so close that House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer warned Biden last month not to remove 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 has played out in the Senate, where Biden has refrained from appointing senators to administrative positions due to the limited GOP hold.
The Senate breakdown will be 51-48 when the new Congress is sworn in on Jan. 3, and the majority has not yet been decided until two second Jan. 5 elections in Georgia.. One of the run-offs involves a sitting Republican senator.
In some ways, the closely-split House could provide an opportunity for Biden to reach down 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 movement in the opposite direction. He wants to use floor procedures as a political weapon to bolster the bills with Republican priorities and force vulnerable Democrats to tough votes.
Republicans used the strategy with some success during the current session of Congress, producing campaign ads against Democrats seeking re-election. McCarthy, his own chance of securing the Republican majority in 2022, now within reach, warned shortly after the November election that more ground battles were to come.
McCarthy said that while Republicans won’t have the majority in the New Year, they will “ run the floor. ”
To block those efforts, Democrats are considering by Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla. Proposed changes to the rules raising the threshold for those votes to a two-thirds majority to make it more difficult for Republicans to change the bills.
Still, the new Congress’s initial legislation may not be that difficult for Pelosi to pass, even with a smaller majority.
The agenda is likely rooted in HR 1 through HR9 – the first nine bills of the last Congress – popular Democratic measures on voting rights, lowering the prices of prescription drugs, raising the minimum wage, and background checks required for gun purchases that most Democrats have already voted.
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Alan Fram, Associated Press author, contributed to this report.