And now, the 118th Congress convenes.  What can we expect to see?

Starting with the Senate:  As a result of the 2022 elections, there will now be 51 senators who are either Democrats or Independents who caucus with the Democrats (there are 3 in that latter category) and 49 Republicans.  Because the Republicans control the House and because it actually takes 60 seats for either party to actually control the Senate, this doesn’t translate into any great legislative prospects for the Democrats.  It does, however, mean that Biden can expect to continue to have the cooperation he needs for confirming his judicial appointments.  Biden has set a record for both the number of women and the number of Black women he has appointed to the bench, and of course it’s to be expected that the people he appoints to the bench will be either liberals or at least judges who don’t have big records of conservatism.  So Biden will likely continue the process of balancing off the huge rash of conservative appointments that Trump made during his four years, when he had a Republican majority behind him in the Senate.

Turning now to the House:  The Republicans were expected to make a big sweep, but all they got was a narrow majority.  Still, that narrow majority is going to be enough to do two things:  (1) make sure that no legislation that the party doesn’t want will come up for a vote, and (2) launch a spate of committee investigations designed to embarrass President Biden.

First, the Republicans have to agree on a Speaker of the House.  Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader for the past four years, wants to be Speaker, but he has some opposition from conservatives who don’t think he’s conservative enough, or perhaps don’t think he’s Trumpy enough.  It’s not a neat division, and in fact he has he support of the looniest Trump supporter of all in the House, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who won re-election.  The question is, if the Republicans can’t agree on McCarthy, whom can they agree on?  They need somebody who can get the votes of both the Trump extremists and the more mainstream “establishment” Republicans, though even there, one doesn’t find many who actually repudiate Trump.

One more thing about the 2022 elections:  Although many election deniers (the people who deny that Joe Biden was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election) were defeated at the state level, both the House and Senate still have most of the lawmakers who voted against certifying the results of the electoral college in the famous January 6 session.  However, it’s also true that Congress successfully passed the Electoral Count Act of 2022 in the final days of its last session.  That act solidifies the principle that the vice president has no authority to overturn the count, and it provides that in order to question the certification of the electoral vote from any state, it now takes a fifth of both chambers rather than just one member of each chamber to challenge the results.  So it is going to be harder to interfere with the electoral vote count next time around than it was last time.

Article in Politico, January 2, 2023

Article in TheHill, December 25, 2022

NPR report, January 1, 2023

Happy New Year, and please keep following what’s going on.