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Ouch. House Speaker Mike Johnson’s ultra-skinny margin for error will soon shrink to just a single vote after his preferred candidate failed to lock down a critical vacant seat in a special election this week.
That vacant seat, incidentally, belonged to none other than Kevin McCarthy, who decided to make Johnson’s already impossible life even more difficult by resigning after far-right renegades booted him from the speakership.
Yet both McCarthy and Johnson united behind Assemblyman Vince Fong in the race to fill that vacancy, though Fong left them both disappointed on Tuesday night when he fell far short of the majority needed to win McCarthy’s seat without a second round of voting. As a result, Fong and a yet-to-be-determined opponent will face off again in late May.
And as a result of that, the GOP caucus in the House will, for the next two months, sit at just 218 members come Friday, when Colorado Republican Ken Buck heads to the exits. Democrats, meanwhile, currently hold 213 seats, but that total will increase to 214 at the end of next month when a special election for a safely blue seat in upstate New York concludes. And this is where the math comes in—math that’s painful for Johnson, delightful for everyone else.
Once Democrats are back at full strength, Johnson will be able to afford a maximum of one defection on any given vote. That’s because if two Republicans join with Democrats —who’ve done a remarkably good job remaining united on just about everything—we’d wind up with a 216-216 tie. And in parliamentary politics, there are no prizes for ties; it’s the same as a loss.
The best part is that there’s simply nothing Republicans can do about this state of affairs. If anything, things might just get worse: When Buck was asked recently whether his colleagues were upset with him for bailing, he told Axios, “I think it’s the next three people that leave that they’re going to be worried about.”
Buck’s fellow Freedom Caucus members, however, are upset with him. Just three days before Buck’s departure, the group stripped him of his membership—because, one source told The Hill, he’s “leaving the conference hanging with a historically narrow margin.”
Indeed he is. But whatever the size of Johnson’s cushion, his caucus is in chaos. He’s had to repeatedly rely on Democrats to get anything done, which just makes it even easier for Democrats to argue that votes should put them back in charge of the House this fall. After all, it’s not like Johnson’s of very much at all these days.
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