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Tag: Republican-controlled House

  • Texas’ Republican-controlled House approves new maps to create more winnable GOP congressional seats

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    It’s been over 24 hours since Republican Texas House Speaker Dustin Burr said Democrats would be released into the custody of *** designated Department of Public Safety officer after Monday’s session. The doorkeeper will lock the doors, while other Democrats complied. State rep Nicole Collier refused. I am exercising my constitutional right to oppose. Instead. Settled in at her desk to spend the night. Collier posted on social media that she refused to sign away my dignity. I feel like this is wrong, that they are exercising this type of control over another person. It’s un-American. Texas House conservatives aim to put *** redistricting bill on the floor Wednesday after the redistricting committee voted to advance new congressional maps. GOP. Efforts to redraw maps would likely create 5 more GOP leaning seats ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. In order to secure the vote, Republicans need *** quorum of lawmakers, which Democrats had previously skipped out on by leaving the state. Their 15 day standoff ended Monday when they returned, and Democratic legislators in California agreed to consider employing similar. Districting maneuvers as Republicans have done in Texas. We didn’t ask for this fight. They brought this fight to us, and California cannot stand down if other states are attempting to cheat and rig the election in 20. On Tuesday, the California Senate committee voted 4 to 1 to advance *** bill that redraws that state’s congressional boundaries. I’m Sherelle Hubbard reporting.

    Texas Republicans on Wednesday took the first step toward approving new congressional maps that would give their party as many as five new seats in the House of Representatives, spurring what’s likely to be a national battle over redistricting.The approval by the Texas House of Representatives came at the urging of President Donald Trump, who pushed for the extraordinary mid-decade revision of congressional maps to give his party a better chance at holding onto the U.S. House of Representatives in next year’s election. The maps need to be approved by the state Senate and signed by Gov. Greg Abbott before they become official.Texas state legislative Democrats delayed the vote by two weeks by fleeing the state earlier this month in protest, and were assigned round-the-clock police monitoring upon their return to ensure they attended Wednesday’s session.The approval of the Texas maps is likely to prompt California’s Democratic-controlled state Legislature to approve a new House map creating Democratic-leaning districts. Unlike in Texas, the California map would require approval by voters in November before it becomes official.Democrats have also vowed to sue to challenge the new Texas map and complained that Republicans made the political power move before passing legislation responding to deadly floods that swept the state last month.

    Texas Republicans on Wednesday took the first step toward approving new congressional maps that would give their party as many as five new seats in the House of Representatives, spurring what’s likely to be a national battle over redistricting.

    The approval by the Texas House of Representatives came at the urging of President Donald Trump, who pushed for the extraordinary mid-decade revision of congressional maps to give his party a better chance at holding onto the U.S. House of Representatives in next year’s election. The maps need to be approved by the state Senate and signed by Gov. Greg Abbott before they become official.

    Texas state legislative Democrats delayed the vote by two weeks by fleeing the state earlier this month in protest, and were assigned round-the-clock police monitoring upon their return to ensure they attended Wednesday’s session.

    The approval of the Texas maps is likely to prompt California’s Democratic-controlled state Legislature to approve a new House map creating Democratic-leaning districts. Unlike in Texas, the California map would require approval by voters in November before it becomes official.

    Democrats have also vowed to sue to challenge the new Texas map and complained that Republicans made the political power move before passing legislation responding to deadly floods that swept the state last month.

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  • How Democrats Could Disqualify Trump If the Supreme Court Doesn’t

    How Democrats Could Disqualify Trump If the Supreme Court Doesn’t

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    Updated at 9:13 a.m. ET on February 28, 2024

    Near the end of the Supreme Court’s oral arguments about whether Colorado could exclude former President Donald Trump from its ballot as an insurrectionist, the attorney representing voters from the state offered a warning to the justices—one evoking the January 6 riot that had set the case in motion.

    By this point in the hearing, the justices had made clear that they didn’t like the idea of allowing a single state to kick Trump out of the presidential race, and they didn’t appear comfortable with the Court doing so either. Sensing that Trump would likely stay on the ballot, the attorney, Jason Murray, said that if the Supreme Court didn’t resolve the question of Trump’s eligibility, “it could come back with a vengeance”—after the election, when Congress meets once again to count and certify the votes of the Electoral College.

    Murray and other legal scholars say that, absent clear guidance from the Supreme Court, a Trump win could lead to a constitutional crisis in Congress. Democrats would have to choose between confirming a winner many of them believe is ineligible and defying the will of voters who elected him. Their choice could be decisive: As their victory in a House special election in New York last week demonstrated, Democrats have a serious chance of winning a majority in Congress in November, even if Trump recaptures the presidency on the same day. If that happens, they could have the votes to prevent him from taking office.

    In interviews, senior House Democrats would not commit to certifying a Trump win, saying they would do so only if the Supreme Court affirms his eligibility. But during oral arguments, liberal and conservative justices alike seemed inclined to dodge the question of his eligibility altogether and throw the decision to Congress.

    “That would be a colossal disaster,” Representative Adam Schiff of California told me. “We already had one horrendous January 6. We don’t need another.”

    The justices could conclude definitively that Trump is eligible to serve another term as president. The Fourteenth Amendment bars people who have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” from holding office, but it does not define those terms. Trump has not been convicted of fomenting an insurrection, nor do any of his 91 indictments charge him with that particular crime. But in early 2021, every House Democrat (along with 10 Republicans) voted to impeach Trump for “incitement of insurrection,” and a significant majority of those lawmakers will still be in Congress next year.

    Edward B. Foley: What the Colorado oral argument missed

    If the Court deems Trump eligible, even a few of his most fervent Democratic critics told me they would vote for certification should he win. “I’m going to follow the law,” Representative Eric Swalwell of California told me. “I would not object out of protest of how the Supreme Court comes down. It would be doing what I didn’t like about the January 6 Republicans.” Schiff, who served on the committee that investigated Trump’s role in the Capitol riot, believes that the Supreme Court should rule that Trump is disqualified. But if the Court deems Trump eligible, Schiff said, he wouldn’t object to a Trump victory.

    What if the Court declines to answer? “I don’t want to get into the chaos hypothetical,” Schiff told me. Nor did Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, who served in the party leadership for two decades. “I think he’s an insurrectionist,” he said of Trump. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who would become speaker if Democrats retake the House, did not respond to questions sent to his office.

    Even as Democrats left open the possibility of challenging a Trump win, they shuddered at its potential repercussions. For three years they have attacked the 147 Republicans—including a majority of the party’s House conference—who voted to overturn President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory. More recently they’ve criticized top congressional Republicans such as Representative Elise Stefanik, the House GOP conference chair, for refusing to commit to certifying a Biden win.

    The choice that Democrats would face if Trump won without a definitive ruling on his eligibility was almost too fraught for Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland to contemplate. He told me he didn’t know how he’d vote in that scenario. As we spoke about what might happen, he recalled the brutality of January 6. “There was blood all over the Capitol in the hypothetical you posit,” Raskin, who served on the January 6 committee with Schiff, told me.

    Theoretically, the House and Senate could act before the election by passing a law that defines the meaning of “insurrection” in the Fourteenth Amendment and establishes a process to determine whether a candidate is barred from holding a particular office, including the presidency. But such a bill would have to get through the Republican-controlled House, whose leaders have all endorsed Trump’s candidacy. “There’s absolutely no chance in the world,” Representative Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat who also served on the January 6 committee, told me.

    In late 2022, Congress did enact reforms to the Electoral Count Act. That bill raised the threshold for objecting to a state’s slate of electors, and it clarified that the vice president, in presiding over the opening of Electoral College ballots, has no real power to affect the outcome of the election. But it did not address the question of insurrection.

    As Republicans are fond of pointing out, Democrats have objected to the certification of each GOP presidential winner since 2000. None of those challenges went anywhere, and they were all premised on disputing the outcome or legitimacy of the election itself. Contesting a presidential election by claiming that the winner is ineligible, however, has no precedent. “It’s very murky,” Lofgren said. She believes that Trump is “clearly ineligible,” but acknowledged that “there’s no procedure, per se, for challenging on this basis.”

    Quinta Jurecic: The Supreme Court is eager to rid itself of this difficult Trump question

    In an amicus brief to the Supreme Court, a trio of legal scholars—Edward Foley, Benjamin Ginsberg, and Richard Hasen—warned the justices that if they did not rule on Trump’s eligibility, “it is a certainty” that members of Congress would seek to disqualify him on January 6, 2025. I asked Lofgren whether she would be one of those lawmakers. “I might be.”

    (After this article was published, Lofgren issued a statement to “clarify” her position. “I would consider objecting to the electoral vote certification under the Electoral Count Act if the Supreme Court rules that the 14th Amendment required such action despite the Electoral Count Act,” she said. “I am not considering objecting prior to the Supreme Court issuing its decision and if the decision provides that path legally.”)

    The scholars also warned that serious political instability and violence could ensue. That possibility was on Raskin’s mind, too. He conceded that the threat of violence could influence what Democrats do if Trump wins. But, Raskin added, it wouldn’t necessarily stop them from trying to disqualify him. “We might just decide that’s something we need to prepare for.”

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    Russell Berman

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  • The Case for Debt-Ceiling Optimism

    The Case for Debt-Ceiling Optimism

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    As the government careens toward the brink of default without a deal to lift the debt limit, an unlikely source of reassurance has emerged.

    “I think everyone needs to relax,” Mitch McConnell told reporters on Tuesday in his home state of Kentucky. “The country will not default.” The longtime Republican leader, who once boasted of being the Senate’s “grim reaper,” isn’t known for his soothing bedside manner. His equanimity was hard to reconcile with the vibes emanating from the Capitol on that particular day, where House Republican negotiators were accusing their Democratic counterparts in the White House of intransigence and insisting that the sides remained far apart.

    The Treasury Department has said that if Congress does not raise the nation’s borrowing limit, the government could, as early as June 1, default on its debt for the first time. The economic repercussions could be catastrophic—first a market crash, then, economists believe, a recession. Because the House and Senate would need at least a few days to approve any agreement that President Joe Biden strikes with Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the real deadline could be even sooner.

    But McConnell, who has spent nearly half of his 81 years on Earth in the Senate, has seen more than a few difficult negotiations. Despite all the histrionics—the censorious sound bites, the “red lines” each side has drawn, the breakdowns and “pauses”—the talks thus far haven’t looked all that different from past Washington deadline dances, which tend to end with a deal. “This is not that unusual,” McConnell said.

    Read: Why Biden caved

    The public feuding is actually a good sign, and so, in a way, is the delay. “They need this to run to the very last minute,” Brendan Buck, a former aide to Speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan, told me. As Buck sees it, the theatrics between GOP and Democratic leaders is a necessary precursor to a deal, because it shows partisans on their respective sides that they fought as hard as they could before reaching a compromise.

    Biden and McCarthy are trying to find a solution that can pass both a Republican-controlled House and a Democratic-controlled Senate. A quick-and-tidy agreement is likely to be viewed suspiciously by both parties, and particularly the GOP’s hard-right faction, which made McCarthy sweat out 15 votes to become speaker. “There’s no way McCarthy could have walked in two weeks ago, had a one-hour meeting with the president, and come out and said, ‘We have a deal,’” Matt Glassman, a former congressional aide who is now a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute, told me. “That would be just deadly for him with his conference.”

    Today’s impasse has drawn comparisons to the debt-ceiling negotiations in 2011 between Boehner and then-President Barack Obama. Those talks featured even more drama, including the sudden collapse of a “grand bargain” and, later, a worried prime-time address to the nation from Obama. Even though the two parties have since drifted further apart (mostly thanks to the GOP’s move rightward), the gap between them in these negotiations is much smaller.

    Back then, Obama was pushing aggressively for tax increases, while Boehner wanted several trillion dollars in spending cuts, including major changes to entitlement programs. Biden initially took a harder line this time, refusing for months to engage McCarthy in negotiations over the debt ceiling. But since backing off that position, he’s made only half-hearted—and swiftly rejected—attempts to get McCarthy to raise taxes or make any kind of policy concession. To the frustration of progressives, he’s even seemed willing to tighten work requirements for people receiving federal safety-net benefits. Republicans, for their part, have agreed not to seek cuts to Medicare or Social Security. “I don’t actually think this is that difficult of a deal to reach,” Buck said. Getting that deal through the House and the Senate, he said, will be more difficult, which is why both Biden and McCarthy will need to save the biggest deadline pressure for the votes themselves.

    Conor Clarke: There is no constitutional end run around the debt ceiling

    By most accounts, the parties are haggling chiefly over whether to freeze government spending at current levels—Biden’s latest offer—or cut as much as $130 billion by reverting to 2022 spending, as Republicans have proposed. Republicans want to exempt the Defense Department from any cuts, which is a sticking point for Democrats.

    Considering the yawning philosophical differences between the parties, that’s not much of a gap. “Compromising over numbers isn’t that hard,” Glassman said. “It’s not like compromising over abortion.”

    Look closer and there are other reasons for optimism. Although some of McCarthy’s members are urging him to hold fast to the conservative provisions of the debt-ceiling bill Republicans narrowly passed last month, the speaker has moved off those demands. Even the blowups have been timed, either intentionally or coincidentally, to avoid spooking investors and causing stock markets to slide. The White House meetings between McCarthy and Biden, for example, have all occurred after the markets closed, and the biggest breakdown in the talks (so far) happened over the weekend before negotiations resumed on Monday.

    Republicans have many reasons for not causing a stock-market crash; the simplest is that they and many of their constituents would stand to lose a lot of money. Another possible reason is that party leaders, and McConnell especially, seem to recognize that a panic over the debt ceiling is not in their political interest and could undermine their negotiating position.

    McConnell is not a soothsayer—his prediction that Donald Trump’s grip on the GOP would loosen, for example, has not exactly panned out. Nor is his confidence that the country will avert default merely a forecast from a disinterested observer. If McConnell is saying it, he must think it benefits Republicans for him to do so.

    But even a self-interested assurance is one more indication of hope, a sign that Republicans want to prevent economic disaster. A debt-ceiling deal between Biden and McCarthy remains more likely than not. It might just take a few more days of posturing and setbacks before it happens.

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    Russell Berman

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