As the final primaries wrap up and we head into the full gale of the general election campaign season, the consensus is that Republicans are all but certain to lose their very narrow House majority.
If you ask Nate Silver and his team, they’ll say there’s an 86 percent chance of Democratic control with the highest probability of a 15-seat majority for the blue team. The gang at Decision Desk HQ sees a slightly closer contest, forecasting a 66 percent probability that Democrats take over, with the fat part of their bell curve right around a 12-seat Democratic majority. But nobody seems to think that what amounts to a two-seat current majority for House Republicans will survive whatever is brewing up for this fall.
That’s a real bummer for Republicans, given that the GOP spent all that money and effort on their mid-decade gerrymandering blitz only to see it become their Maginot Line. If you look at the current ratings from the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter or Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia, you see that the GOP is only netting out three or four sure gerrymandered pickups — nowhere near enough to save them.
Certainly that’s how Washington is behaving. The closed-door meeting between Jared Kushner — President Trump’s son-in-law and ambassador without portfolio — and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) certainly suggests an air of Democratic inevitability. So does the capitulation from House Republicans on punting the rest of their legislative agenda until after the election.
How big a prospective Democratic House majority may be certainly matters, most of all to Jeffries. He’s going to be getting at least a half dozen more members of the “squad” or the Justice Democrats, or whatever you like to call the blue version of the Tea Party. They will be intent on making it as hard as possible for the would-be Speaker to get anything done. But if Democrats have a great year instead of just a good one, the extra seats will come from Republican-leaning swing districts likely to produce pragmatic new representatives.
But whether Jeffries is under siege from the start or has a 12-seat cushion to protect him from extortionate demands, there’s one thing that won’t be avoided: a third impeachment of Donald Trump.
There are already a few Democrats saying that it would be a pointless distraction to launch yet another failed impeachment and that the party should use a new House majority to focus on issues that matter to the American people. This sounds good and would make a certain amount of sense, but for the fact that a new House majority wouldn’t be doing much of anything at all.
Let’s take the high end of the register for Democrats this fall and suppose that they have a substantial cushion in the House and manage to flip the Senate. Even in that world, Democrats would be nursing a one- or two-seat Senate majority that would surely include red-state moderates unwilling to go along with radical moves.
And as far as legislating goes, the presidential veto power makes the Senate a lot easier to blockade than the Strait of Hormuz. No, the only work that’s likely to be done in a divided Washington is going to be around shutting down the government and then trying to reopen it. Get your furlough counters ready, folks.
The typical answer for the party with Congress in periods of divided government is oversight. That’s certainly how Republicans busied themselves in the last two years of the Biden administration, when Hunter Biden got more airtime than pharmaceutical ads. But Democrats won’t even have that option, at least through normal means. In his first term, Trump already made clear that neither he nor the members of his administration will comply with hostile congressional subpoenas. They will not come, nor will they produce the documents demanded.
Democrats could then hold theatrical hearings to “call attention” to the refusals, but those pass over the public consciousness like clouds on a spring zephyr. Congress can hold members of the administration in contempt, but as both parties have proven, it’s a toothless threat. Congress lacks police powers, and the Trump Justice Department isn’t going to help. There’s also the power of the purse, but Democrats will already be in continuing resolution hell from the start. Lawmakers can always sue, but the courts — even before the current one — have taken an expansive view of executive privilege.
Courts, though, have always had a different standard when it comes to the matter of impeachments, when Congress gets its greatest degree of judicial deference. In the three modern impeachments, the very act of beginning the process has unlocked congressional superpowers. And Trump would be daring them to do it — he of the crypto billions, the gifted jumbo jet, the drug boat kill teams and the budget impoundment. The biggest challenge would be deciding what to include and what to leave out.
Of course, if Republicans hold the Senate in November, those powers will quickly wear off. Trump’s first two impeachment trials were perfunctory matters conducted in a Republican-controlled Senate, lasting 20 days in 2020 and just five days in 2021. This is the world in which a fast, failed impeachment may actually help Trump rally his party around him.
A Democratic Senate, however, would be different. In 1868, a hostile Senate spent 82 days on the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson. The 2027 version could make that look like a cakewalk, with week after week of testimony and document dumps. And the rules say that all the while no other actions may come to the floor. It’s the ultimate gridlock.
Those may be the real stakes in the battle for the Senate. Not whether Trump is impeached again, but whether it is another stunt or something that actually draws blood.
