The Daily - A Republican House

Episode Date: November 16, 2022

Divided government appears poised to return to Washington. In the midterm elections, the Republicans seem likely to manage to eke out a majority in the House, but they will have a historically small margin of control.The Republican majority will be very conservative, made up of longtime members — some of whom have drifted more to the right — and a small but influential group of hard-right Republicans who are quite allied with former President Donald J. Trump and helped lead the effort to try to overturn the 2020 election.What can we expect from this new Republican-controlled House?Guest: Julie Davis, congressional editor for The New York Times.Background reading: After the midterm elections, the Republican ranks in the House have grown more extreme and slightly more diverse.Republican rebels are trying to make their leaders sweat after a worse-than-expected outcome in the elections.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, divided government is returning to Washington as Republicans prepare to take control of the House of Representatives. My colleague, Congressional Editor Julie Davis, explains what this Republican House plans to do and not do with its newfound power. It's Wednesday, November 16th. Julie, there was a brief moment just a few days ago when it very much looked like the House of Representatives could go either way, Republican or Democrat. But that moment apparently is now over.

Yes, that moment is over and it now looks like Republicans will manage to eke out a majority. And what changed over the past, I guess, 24 hours, 72 hours to make that the case? And I guess we should say, because this is still a moving target, it is around 3 p.m. on Tuesday, results are still rolling in. Why are we now so confident that this will be a Republican-controlled House? We're confident because there are only about a dozen races that are still unresolved, and some of those are leaning toward Republicans. In other words, the Republican has enough of an advantage that it looks like

they're going to win. They only need one more seat at this point to get to the 218 that would give them the majority. And so we're getting to the point where it's going to be impossible for Democrats to make up the difference. Got it. And when all this is said and done, Julie, what's our expectation of how big a majority Republicans might have? Well, right now, like you said, at 3 p.m., the projection is they'll have 221 seats. They could be below that. They could be a little bit above that. But that's still a historically small margin of control that's going to make life very interesting for Republicans next year.

Right. And so we will now be entering a divided Washington, one where the House is controlled by Republicans, but the White House and the Senate are controlled by Democrats. So we want to talk with you about what this Republican-controlled House is going to look like, and what it will do, and how it's going to relate to the rest of the federal government. So just to begin, give us a portrait of this new Republican majority in the House. Who is this group of people? So the Republican majority in the House is going to be a very conservative, pretty right-wing group. It is a lot of members of Congress who have served for a long time,

and some of them have drifted further to the right in recent years, sort of following in the footsteps of where President Trump took the party. Right. But then there's a smaller but actually quite influential group of really hard-right Republicans. Many of them are members of the House Freedom Caucus, who are quite allied with the former president. They helped lead the effort to try to overturn the 2020 election. They've continued to push conspiracy theories. They really have been sort of the extremist voices on Capitol Hill. And they have really been emboldened in recent years, and certainly after

this last election result that the Republicans are dealing with, to try to really throw their weight around and have a greater influence inside the Republican conference in the House than their numbers would suggest. Well, Julie, can you explain that? Because as we've said on the show many times since this midterm election, the outcome was widely seen as a rebuke of far-right republicanism and of Trump. And a lot of Trump's candidates lost. A lot of hard-right, election-denying candidates were defeated. And so why would this group of far-right House members suddenly see themselves as having more power rather than less power, given that rebuke? Well, it's kind of counterintuitive, but it's really just because of math. Because you're right that the midterm was something of a sort of repudiation of Trump's influence and of some of the extremism that these members align themselves with. But

it has left the Republican leadership with a tiny, tiny majority. And that gives factions a lot of power. And they are by far the largest faction in the Republican conference. And so if they stick together, and with a majority of only a few seats, not many of them have to stick together, they can really wreak havoc on the floor. They can stop legislation from coming up. They can insist on legislation being brought up. And they can make life very difficult unless they're being listened to. Interesting. message was from these midterms about far-right House members, the reality is the majority that the Republican Party has in the House is so small that these far-right members can pretty much

block anything, allow anything, and so they're going to have this outsized power within the Republican caucus. Right, and this is a group of people that has never particularly liked to vote yes on much of anything legislatively. Many of them are just ideologically opposed to spending bills. Many of them do not want to see any sort of expansion of government, so they don't want to vote for policy bills. What this group is really interested in is making ideological points. And in this case, now that they have the majority retaliating against President Biden, against Democrats, exacting payback for how former President Trump was treated, they don't want to vote on legislation. They just want to say no and make life hard for their political opponents. Well, despite the disinclination of

many of these House Republicans to vote yes on legislation, I'm curious what kind of bills we expect to see from this new slim House majority. Well, the Republicans haven't really articulated a super coherent view of what their affirmative agenda would be. A lot of the campaign was about criticizing President Biden and the Democrats and saying that what they did had contributed to inflation and was wrong. But from what we know, they want to do a few things. They've said their first order of business is going to be to defund the IRS, essentially to take back this large pot of money that was included in the Inflation Reduction Act to basically allow the IRS to go after tax cheats and enforce laws more

effectively. And in that way, to finance a lot of the things that were in that bill, which included tackling climate change and lowering health care costs and a lot of Democratic priorities that Republicans, frankly, don't agree with. Right. Biden's argument was, if we go after the richest people who don't pay their taxes, we can get a whole lot done. Right. And Republicans argue that we don't actually want to get that stuff done. But also, they say that this is just a backdoor way to expand the IRS and they've contorted it into sort of a scheme whereby, you know, tens of thousands of new IRS agents are going to show up at people's doors to investigate every aspect of their lives and try to squeeze more money out of them. what that legislation does, but it's a very useful talking point for them because nobody likes the idea that the federal government is going to come after you and knock on your door and, you know, demand more money from you. And so that's their way of making the political case

for going after what was essentially a way to finance a big new social program that was broadly popular. Got it. So the first thing that Republicans in the House are going to try to do is strip funding for the IRS. What else do they plan to do? They've also talked a lot about better securing the border. They want to really crack down in a lot of the ways that former President Trump used to talk about a number of measures to make it more difficult for undocumented people and for, frankly, asylum seekers even to enter the country. And finally, they've also been talking a lot about a parent's bill of rights. It's not totally clear what would be in a bill like this,

but it's sort of a catch-all for a lot of these cultural debates and sort of complaints that Republicans and conservatives have been really pressing over the last several years about having more control over what kind of books children read in school, you know, being upset about curriculum or material that their kids might come across. This is sort of a way of them talking about all of those things while couching it as an effort to give parents more of a say in what happens in their children's schools. And all of these are highly ideological bills that House Republicans almost certainly know have very little chance of passing in a Democratic Senate.

So these are essentially base-satisfying votes. Right. They're base-satisfying votes. They're votes designed to put Democrats in a politically difficult position and give Republicans something to run on in the next set of elections. But they know that not only do these bills not have a shot of getting passed in the Senate, they're not even going to be taken up by the Senate

now that the Senate is in Democratic hands. Got it. But I think what we will see is on the legislation that has to get done, they're not even going to be taken up by the Senate now that the Senate is in Democratic hands. Got it. But I think what we will see is on the legislation that has to get done, which is bills to actually fund the government to prevent it from shutting down. That's where we're going to see a lot of these fights play out over policy, because they will try to use funding and spending to get at aspects of President Biden's agenda. They can put provisions in a spending bill to defund the IRS.

They can say no money can be spent to deliver on, you know, any number of President Biden's priorities. And they can insist that money be spent on border security that they otherwise wouldn't be able to legislate on because they don't have the votes. So the normal legislation meant to kind of keep the government humming along is likely

to be used by this new House majority as a weapon to go after President Biden and perhaps in some cases lead to these showdowns over whether the government can even stay open or has to shut down. That's right. And Julie, what else do we know about how Republicans are going to use their new majority and power in the House? Well, we know that they're also very eager to get started on a whole bunch of investigations. This is something that they have been very outspoken about and very enthusiastic about the whole time they've been campaigning to take the House majority. We are in a battle and we have to open up every vector of attack on a corrupt administration.

And that's why it should be investigations first. I got one word for Hunter Biden. I've got news for him that when Republicans are in the majority, he will be called to testify before the oversight committee. And so I think we are very likely to see investigations of Hunter Biden, the president's son, who has been questioned about some of his business ties overseas. The debacle in Afghanistan has never been, no one has ever been held accountable. There's never been an investigation into the pullout. We are likely to see an investigation of the withdrawal from Afghanistan and how that unfolded and how the decisions were made there. Our committee, if we get the chance to be in the majority on Judiciary Committee, we're

going to look into this weaponization of the DOJ against the American people. In recent days, some of the right-wing Republicans have been insisting, and their leaders seem open to this, that there be an investigation of how the Justice Department has treated defendants who were jailed in connection with the January 6th attack on the Capitol. What is your first priority if Republicans take the House? Impeach Joe Biden. And they've also said that they might even undertake impeachment proceedings, not just against President Biden, but against members of his cabinet.

We will give Secretary Mayorkas a reserved parking spot. He will be testifying so much about this. Including Alejandro Mayorkas, the Homeland Security Secretary, who they have accused of being derelict in his duty of enforcing the border. Wait, can the House impeach cabinet members? The House has impeachment power, yes. Not just for the president, but for members of his cabinet as well. Got it. And what would the House, in theory, impeach President Biden for?

I have introduced House Res 57. These are articles of impeachment on President Biden. There are, I think, a couple of dozen articles of impeachment that have been introduced at this point. This has to do with the national security crisis that President Biden has created with regards to the extreme threat at the southern border. It ranges from the very specific, that he hasn't secured the border or enforced the border, to the much more general, that he has abused his power in some way. There is just an appetite, particularly on the right, to figure out some group of offenses that they could charge him with that would be akin to what former President Trump faced.

And Julie, I hate to ask you to prognosticate, but because impeachments, as we've learned from the two that involved President Trump, are so consuming in every way when it comes to Congress, how likely do you think it is that a full-blown impeachment process will be undertaken when it comes to President Biden and this new House majority? when it comes to President Biden and this new House majority? So Republican House leaders have been really soft-pedaling the possibility of this in recent months. They don't want to undertake a political impeachment, but there is going to be immense pressure on the right from some of those Freedom Caucus members to do it. And that is one of the reasons that I think we've heard more talk about impeaching cabinet secretaries, because it's less consuming, institutionally speaking. But there's no question that this is going to be a dilemma for them. They say that they're not actively

considering it now, but it's not going to be long before there are some pretty strong calls to start looking into it. We'll be right back. So Julie, how does the Republican House leader and now the presumptive House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, how does he fit into everything that you have been describing, especially this instinct to hold up spending and conduct investigations into the Biden administration by this new House majority? Because we've come to know McCarthy not all that well, but what we know of him is as an ally of Donald Trump and somebody who at almost every turn has done Trump's bidding in Congress. Right, he has. I mean, Kevin McCarthy has remained loyal to Trump.

He went and saw Trump at Mar-a-Lago. He fought the formation of the January 6th investigation. He refused to let his members sit on the committee at all. He is not broken publicly with anything that Trump has said or done. So rather than sort of pulling the House to the center, maybe in the mold of how we would have seen him at the beginning of his career, kind of as a Chamber of Commerce, country club Republican, he is really kind of following the trend of the party,

and he's been pretty susceptible to pressure from the extreme right wing of the party. So you're saying he embodies the rightward turn of the party and is going to facilitate the empowerment of that wing of the party, not fundamentally seek to block it or alter it or reshape it. That's right. He's not a person who has sort of his own very strong theory of the case.

He's not a Nancy Pelosi who had a very, very strong view as speaker of what she wanted to happen and how it needed to happen and sort of led her members along in a pretty tough way at times to sort of keep them unified. That is not the sort of thing that Kevin McCarthy is known for. He is known for recruiting. He's known for political messaging and putting forth the public face of the party. But in the room, he is not a person who's really going to challenge where his members are going. And the other thing about Nancy Pelosi, at least in the last few years as Speaker, she was dealing with a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate in the last two years with a Democrat in the White House. And so when you're trying to get a group of people

to vote the way you need them to vote, being able to say, you know, we have an opportunity to actually have something enacted into law becomes very compelling. This is for keeps. Yeah. And if you're Kevin McCarthy and the best you're going to do is a bill that's dead on arrival in the Senate, that's a different calculation. It's a little bit harder to get people to do what you want them to. So, Julie, given the dynamics you're describing and the leadership you're describing of this House majority, how does the Senate, still in Democratic hands, function in relationship to this House? So the Senate is going to be an interesting place because the Democrats did retain their majority, but they too are limited in what they can do because they don't have the House.

Right now, Senator Schumer, the majority leader who will stay majority leader, is saying that he wants to work with Republicans. He wants them to dump their ideological beliefs and just figure out places to compromise. I'll work with you if you're no longer who you are. come to the middle and govern with the Democrats. But yes, I think Republicans see it just the way you put it, Michael, that he's asking them to give up their principles and there's no way they're going to do that. Right. And particularly at this moment for the party where they're kind of in turmoil

trying to figure out what just happened to them and why, you might think it would put them in a mood to compromise, but that doesn't seem to be where things are right now. Mm-hmm. Well, I guess I'm wondering, is there some narrow band of issues that could produce compromise between this House controlled by Republicans and this Senate controlled by Schumer and the Democrats? I mean, is that what Schumer is also perhaps envisioning? Potentially, but narrow is definitely the right word to use. And when you talk to lawmakers

privately, they will say, you know, there is a deal to be had on immigration. There are things that can be done on healthcare costs, but it's going to be very hard for Republicans to allow that to happen because they will be blamed. And we've heard some Republicans blaming Mitch McConnell in the aftermath of last week, saying that because he allowed Republicans to break with their party and compromise with Democrats on some key things, that they cost themselves the election. Interesting. That's the diagnosis of some on the right.

So it's going to be very hard. I think where the Senate will play a big role is in checking the right-wing impulses of the House and sort of protecting and insulating President Biden. But another and arguably more important thing that they can do and that they will do is to keep approving President Biden's judicial nominees. This hasn't gotten a lot of attention, but President Biden has confirmed about 80 federal judges since taking office. This is a big effort that he's undertaken along with the Democrats and progressive activists to really try and make up lost ground from during the Trump administration when Republicans did a lot of spade work trying to stack the judiciary with as many of their conservative picks as they could. So Democrats had a lot of ground to make up and they have made up a lot of ground and there is more to

do. So that is something that the Senate will spend a lot of time on. Right. And this is something that the House plays no role in. So this Senate can just keep passing Biden's judges to the federal bench pretty much unencumbered by anything that happens in the House. Right. And as we've seen, you know, legislation is important. Policy is very important. But the judiciary and decisions by the courts are also incredibly important. So the second two years of President Biden's term will be really defined in a lot of ways by the number of judges he can manage to get on the bench before he's done. Right. So just to summarize this all, we are looking at a Congress, a divided Congress, in which really the era of big sweeping legislation, especially on social issues and things like climate change, that really defined the first two years of the Biden presidency. like climate change that really defined the first two years of the Biden presidency, that is pretty much over. And instead, it's going to be a lot of investigations, especially in the House,

and judicial confirmations in the Senate. Right. And I think because everyone recognizes that's what's coming, and that those are the dynamics that are going to be shaping the new Congress, and also because the election is now behind them, I think in the next few days and weeks, there's going to be a pretty fascinating burst of activity on Capitol Hill in the post-election session. We call it the lame duck session because a lot of the members will be retiring or didn't win re-election. But they have this last chance to do some things, and I think they're going to make the most of it. And which of these lame duck session bills stands out to you?

So just in the next 24 hours, the Senate is going to move on a bill that would recognize same-sex marriages at the federal level. So this is a bill that has bipartisan support. It's called the Respect for Marriage Act that would essentially guarantee that same-sex couples who are married bipartisan support. It's called the Respect for Marriage Act that would essentially guarantee that same-sex couples who are married will be afforded the same rights across the country as any other

married couple. Democrats started pushing it initially just as a messaging bill they never thought could really get done, just to demonstrate that they thought that it should get done, particularly in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, in which a couple of the conservative justices suggested pretty strongly that other rights, including same-sex marriage rights, that the Supreme Court has recognized might be the next thing to be reconsidered. Right. But actually, it ended up drawing many more Republican supporters in the House than anyone thought.

ended up drawing many more Republican supporters in the House than anyone thought. And an effort began late in the summer to actually cut a bipartisan deal to get it through the Senate. And it appears they're on the brink of getting 60 votes, which is what they would need to clear Congress and send that to President Biden. That's a very big thing to get done in a lame duck Congress. And is it safe to assume, Julie, a very big thing to get done in a lame duck Congress. And is it safe to assume, Julie, that this very big bill relating to gay marriage would not pass if House Republicans controlled that chamber? Definitely. And that's even more the case with another piece of legislation that we're expecting to come up in the next several weeks. And that is a bill to overhaul the Electoral Count Act, which lays out Congress's role in certifying the

election right before a new president is inaugurated. This is a bill that has Republican and Democratic support that would essentially just clarify that the vice president does not have the discretion on his or her own to nullify the election results, which is what former President Donald Trump wanted his Vice President Mike Pence to do on January 6th. This bill would make it very clear the Vice President does not have the power to do something like that. Right. So these two bills taken together,

this bill to safeguard same-sex marriage, that's about to become law, this bill to reform the Electoral Countsex marriage that's about to become law, this bill to reform the Electoral Count Act that's about to become law, they are both kind of the last gasp of this Congress before there is a changing of the guard that means neither one, or really anything like it, could get through this divided government. Yeah, and I think you're going to see Democrats characterizing what happens in the next six weeks as the kind of thing that can happen when they are in control or when bipartisanship is still possible because both of those things are bipartisan initiatives. And it's a little bit of a closing argument for them to kind of show that there are things that can be accomplished with unified democratic control of the government. Right. Unified democratic control of the government that is now over.

Correct. Well, Julie, thank you very much. Thank you, Michael. It's been a pleasure. On Tuesday afternoon, House Republicans voted to make Representative Kevin McCarthy their nominee for House Speaker. But in a dramatic show of defiance, 36 House Republicans, most of them ultra-conservatives, voted against McCarthy in an early demonstration of their new power. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Tuesday, Russian-made missiles struck a town in Poland, according to officials there,

killing at least two people and raising fears that the war in Ukraine had spilled over into NATO territory. Russia denied that it had fired the missiles, but Polish officials and NATO leaders convened a series of emergency meetings to investigate the incident and discuss their potential response. And... Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests, and my fellow citizens, America's comeback starts right now. Donald Trump officially announced his third campaign for president on Tuesday night, his third campaign for president on Tuesday night, claiming that the prosperity and peace he oversaw as president

had evaporated under President Biden and vowing that if reelected, he would restore them. This decline is not a fate we must accept. When given the choice boldly, clearly, and directly, I believe the American people will overwhelmingly reject the left's

platform of national ruin, and they will embrace our platform of national greatness and glory. Despite his loss in 2020, his role in the January 6th attack on the Capitol, and the poor performance of candidates he endorsed in the midterms, Trump will immediately become the Republican frontrunner in 2024. Today's episode was produced by Nina Feldman, Rachel Quester, and Sydney Harper. It was edited by Lisa Chow, contains original music by Marian Lozano, Rowan Nemisto, and Alisha Ba'itu, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily.

I'm Michael Bilboro. See you tomorrow.