Republicans are poised to take control of the House of Representatives this month by the narrowest seat margin in nearly 100 years, with a 220-215 majority that will be thinned out even further in the coming weeks as two members take roles in the Trump administration. And if the drama on the floor of the chamber surrounding the election of Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) was any indication, Republicans might be in for a wild ride, including the possibility of losing their majority.
Republicans’ challenge
Johnson’s victory is a “chance for the Republican majority in the House to show the American people it can govern,” said Roll Call. But the procedural struggle to choose Johnson as speaker “seems like a skirmish in a wider fight that will go on for the next two years,” said David Dayen at The American Prospect. Republicans will have “no wiggle room to push their agenda through the House of Representatives,” especially given a “rather unruly caucus that feuded bitterly in the past,” said the New York Post. Johnson’s job will be especially hard until special elections are held to fill the vacancy of former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), as well as Reps. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) and Mike Waltz (R-Fla.), who have been tapped for jobs in President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet.
If Trump “were to continue to raid” the narrow House majority to “fill out his White House and Cabinet, Republicans could lose their edge altogether,” said The New York Times. If Democrats were to win all three of the special elections, control of the chamber would flip. It is also possible that unforeseen events could make the GOP’s hold on the chamber more secure. The history of such narrow majorities may offer us some insight into what will unfold over the next two years.
Lessons from the past
The last time the House was this closely divided, the United States was in crisis. As the Great Depression deepened, it was not clear if Herbert Hoover’s Republicans had maintained their majority in the 1930 elections. While Democrats gained 52 seats, when the dust settled Republicans still held a 218-216 majority, with one third-party lawmaker joining the minority. But a “truly insane thing happened” between the election in November 1930 and when Congress convened in March 1931, which is that 14 members-elect of the House died, said The Washington Post. After a series of special elections were held to fill the vacancies, Democrats emerged with a narrow majority for the remainder of the term. But with Republicans still in charge of the Senate, it is remembered as the “do-little Great Depression’s 72nd Congress” that failed to address the horrors of the unfolding economic crisis, said The Hill.
Sixteen years earlier, Republicans won a 215-214 plurality of the chamber’s 435 seats in the 1916 elections, but with neither party winning a majority, it gave enormous power to four third-party representatives who sided with Speaker Champ Clark’s Democrats, “thus enabling the Democrats to — just barely — retain control of the chamber,” said Pew Research Center. In April 1917, the House voted to declare war on the Central Powers by a 373-50 vote. While the narrow margin and coalition-government might have seemed like a recipe for gridlock, a rally-around-the-flag effect made the new Congress “remarkably productive,” as the two parties worked together on several issues including alcohol prohibition, said the Post.
The House elections in 1848 resulted in neither Democrats nor their major-party counterparts the Whigs gaining an outright majority of seats in the House. The anti-slavery Free Soil Party won 9 seats but even adding them to the Whigs’ 106 did not produce a majority. It therefore took 63 ballots to elect a speaker, Georgia Democrat Howell Cobb, who “played an important role in negotiating and securing the passage of the Compromise of 1850,” which temporarily defused tensions that would later erupt in the Civil War, said The Miller Center.