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The proof of the ongoing dysfunction of Congress is therein current paralysis.
Republicans have a few more votes in the House, but they don’t quite have a governing majority.
So Kevin McCarthy is now the former Speaker of the House, and it’s not at all clear when the two men are actively trying to replace him – House Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana or Donald Trump’s nominee Dem. Jim Jordan of Ohio – will be able to unify the party and reopen the House. It will take near total GOP unity to reopen the chamber.
The size of congressional majorities has generally shrunk in recent years, just as the country’s politics have become much more racial.
Since the “Republican Revolution” of 1994, only two majorities have exceeded 50 seats, compared to previous decades when every Democratic majority exceeded 50 seats, usually along with a string of Republican presidents.
Check out this interactive content on CNN.com
There are many reasons behind this era of small majorities, the first of which is that the country is deeply divided and the Congress, which is meant to be the “People’s House”, represents this division.
But there is more to it than that. Gerrymandered Congressional Maps they focus on protecting incumbents, which means fewer seats change hands, even when there is a shift in the country’s politics.
Despite concern about the economy and disillusionment with President Joe Biden, Republicans failed to pick up many seats in the 2022 midterm elections, barely holding the headache-inducing majority in the House today.
The lack of competitive seats makes us feel like we’re stuck with a closely divided House and a closely divided Senate for the foreseeable future.
The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter assigns a partisan score to each congressional district. A competitive or swing seat has a low score between R+5 (leans slightly Republican) and D+5 (leans slightly Democratic).
The number of these competitive constituencies has halved in recent decades, from 164 in the 1998 election to 82 in the 2022 election.
of the cook recent assessment is that the growing partisan divisions in the country – as well as gerrymandering – is the cause.
To the disadvantage of Democrats, many of the states that have adopted nonpartisan systems to draw their congressional maps have seen a slower erosion of swing districts. They are mostly Republican-held states that have embraced party redistricting and have fewer districts, according to Cook.
The end result is this partisan atmosphere, which seems to be getting more partisan every day, and which rewards the most powerful lawmakers on the fringes with fame and campaign cash.
Negotiators disappoint those in their own parties, but are still in the crosshairs of the opponent.
One of McCarthy’s sins, in the eyes of the far-right lawmakers who succeeded in ousting him, is that he relied on Democratic votes to pass a short-term government funding bill. The partisan tone he took to appease far-right lawmakers meant Democrats were never going to save his job.
McCarthy’s successor, whoever he is, will ultimately have to make a similar calculation next month, when government funding runs out in November.
In the Senate, the seat is most likely to be flipped in the 2024 election, according to CNN’s Simone Pathe, who regularly evaluates the field, it is that of West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin. It aggravates many more liberal Democrats, but it’s also the main reason they have the Senate majority in the first place.
There is a modest means of legislators. More moderate Republicans, many of whom represent districts that voted for Biden in the 2020 presidential election, are hurt that moderate Democrats didn’t help avert this mess by throwing McCarthy a few, consequential votes. But it’s hard to imagine Republicans voting for a Democratic leader.
McCarthy’s quick exit was embarrassing and ugly for him, but making deals to secure leadership is not a uniquely Republican thing. Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s end game was more elegantly executed, but it was an end nonetheless.
She had calm progressive frustration two years earlier, agreeing to limit her leadership to four years, an agreement she honored when she stepped down as Democratic leader after the 2022 midterm elections.
When Pelosi was elected to her final term as speaker in January 2021, she took just 216 votesshort of a majority of 218, partly because some missed the vote and partly because some Democrats voted “absent” to protest it.
It is safe to assume that these leadership struggles will continue as long as the country is so evenly divided that no party has a stable governing majority.