last updated: 4 January 2019 (approximate reading time: 5 minutes; 901 words)
It’s official: the 116th Congress of the United States of America has been sworn in and the Democrats are in charge. Nancy Pelosi has made the record books again: she became the first woman elected Speaker of the House of Representatives in 2007, and now she’s the first Speaker to be re-elected to the post since 1955.
That means that Nancy Pelosi now calls the shots as to who leads committees, what their budgets will be, and what can be voted on. It means that the Democrats will now determine what gets investigated, and how deep those investigations will go.
Pelosi waxed poetic that this is a “new dawn” and that this is now “the people’s House”—in other words, the Democrats are the party of the people, and now that they’re in charge, the people, not the rich white male oligarchs are in charge. Indeed, this is the most diverse House of Representatives ever, and as the chart in the AP News article above shows, nearly all of that diversity is on the Democratic side. The House of Representatives is supposed to look like America, and on the Democratic side, it does. The mostly white, male, older Republican representatives look very much out of touch and out of place in this new congress.
Along those lines, the new House wasted no time in getting things done. In the first day, they passed a spending bill to try and end the Trump shutdown, and Representative Brad Sherman, Democrat from Los Angeles County, introduced articles of impeachment against Donald Trump (co-signed by two additional representatives).
But while the left has already started dancing in the streets that the dragon is as good as slain, it’s important to look at the entire political landscape.
For a budget to become law, both congressional bodies must pass it, and the President must sign it. Trump has stated that he refuses to end his shutdown until he gets $5.6 billion dollars to build a wall that only 28% of Americans think is a priority. Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority leader, has stated that he won’t bring any budget to a vote in the Senate unless he can be reasonably assured that the President supports it. So the House budget is dead on arrival.
For a president to be removed from office, first the House of Representatives must vote to impeach, and then 2/3rds of the Senate must vote to remove. While Sherman has introduced articles of impeachment, Pelosi has said that “we’re not there yet” and will not bring it up for a vote. This may anger the far left but her reasons are wise and sound. She knows that unless there is solid evidence that the American people are behind, a move to impeach will seem vindictive, partisan, and petty. To get that solid evidence will take serious congressional investigations along with the findings of the Mueller investigation already well underway. Moreover, unless Senate Republicans want impeachment as much as Democrats, there’s no chance of impeachment resulting in the president being removed, so the whole thing will just be theater.
This isn’t to say that the House can never pass a budget that will get signed, or that one day there might not be a real move to impeach Trump. But it should be clear that the House of Representatives cannot slay the dragon all by itself.
What the House of Representatives can do is effectively serve as a check on the wanton abuse of Federal power by Republican lawmakers and the White House. They can investigate all the wrongdoing, gerrymandering, voter suppression, and other dirty tactics employed by the GOP and hold it up for public scrutiny. And if the Democrats can prove both that the GOP is corrupt and has been acting in their own, not the people’s interest, and that the Democrats are more capable of governing than the GOP, that can turn into taking the Senate and the White House in 2020.
This isn’t to say it’s impossible for any House originated liberal bills to become law. They might, if the GOP also sees it in their interest. Nor is it impossible that there might be such an obvious and egregious crime or impropriety committed by Trump that there will be a massive outcry among even Republicans to impeach him. But nobody gets to where Pelosi is without being able to read the environment, and she’s not going to try to push the American people in a direction they don’t already want to go.
So while this isn’t the endgame, act II has definitely begun. The Democrats have one of the three bodies necessary for legislation, and one of the two required for impeachment. Pelosi knows that the House’s task is to keep the President in check, and to show that the Democrats truly are the “party of the people” and are fit to lead, so that in 2020, that is the message the people take to the polls.
It might be nice to think that it’s all winding down, but it’s not. Trump is still president, the Senate is still run by the GOP, and there’s still a long way to go before the government is “of the people” again. But this is a great—and necessary—first step.
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