WASHINGTON (AP) – President-elect Joe Biden’s The decision to take advantage of several House Democrats to hold administrative office is putting President Nancy Pelosi in a politically difficult position, after having staggered the already dwindling majority of the party and leaving her potentially without enough votes to approve her agenda. legislative.
Democrats were already heading to the new Congress with a sharp margin about the Republicans. But Biden’s opening to a third lawmaker, Rep. Deb Haaland, DN.M., as the first Native American interior secretary to make history., started a new round of painful conversations about what to do. Pelosi will start the Biden era with a narrow majority, 222-211, with some races still undecided.
But Pelosi’s management team has a plan.
“We have to deal with something like that,” Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina, the Democratic whip and one of Biden’s best allies, said in an interview with The Associated Press this week.
According to Clyburn, an emerging strategy is to stagger confirmations: Biden would stop formally submitting nominations at once so that House numbers do not dwindle immediately.
According to the plan, the calendar would be developed during the first months of the new Congress, enough time for the House to approve the 100-day agenda, a typically important but symbolic legislative sprint that acquires new importance aligned with the Biden presidency.
Biden’s first option in the House, Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-La., Would be quickly incorporated into the administration once the president-elect is inaugurated on Jan. 20, Clyburn said. Richmond is about to become a senior adviser, a position that does not require Senate confirmation.
Biden would then wait to nominate the other two candidates, Haaland and Rep. Marcia Fudge, D-Ohio, who was named secretary of housing, until after the March special election in Louisiana to take the Richmond seat.
Legislators can remain in the House, voting as members, until they are confirmed by the Senate. Their candidacies could be sent one after the other, in the following months.
“You just have to manage it,” Clyburn said.
The three seats in the House are in Democratic strongholds and are expected to be outside the boundaries of Republicans. But special elections can throw curveballs, and the staggered schedule would also give campaigns ample room to run candidates and races.
Democrats are already deeply in search of the political soul after a sad November result for House Democrats. Biden’s victory had short attacks on losing seats and he saw his majority shrink.
Lawmakers and moderate strategists blamed the progressives for pushing the party message too far to the left; progressives complained that it was the centrists who campaigned timidly without a bold message to attract voters.
Pelosi is a master voter at the House of Representatives, but even his skills will be put to the test in the new Congress, starting with his own election for another term. If even a few Democratic lawmakers oppose or break away, passing bills in the new Congress could be difficult.
In an extreme scenario, Republicans could even try to snatch control of the hammer and the majority. If the numbers drop so much – with illness or other absences, which are likely during the COVID-19 crisis – Republicans could try to force a vote at the plant on the issue.
Representative Tom Cole, R-Okla., Said Friday that the marches of the three lawmakers would combine with existing divisions among Democrats to make the government “very tough” for Pelosi.
“In any given vote when your margin is as narrow as this, some people may be angry at something totally unrelated to the vote and can only take it away from you,” Cole said.
The danger zone was close enough that House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer warned Biden that he would remove more Democrats from his ranks last month.
“I thought it would be difficult if, in fact, members of Congress were selected,” Hoyer told reporters this week. “The margin was very close.”
A similar scenario has developed in the Senate, where Biden has refrained from appointing senators to administrative positions due to the close presence of the Republican Party.
The breakdown of the Senate will be 51-48 when the new Congress is sworn in on Jan. 3, with the majority still undecided until the Jan. 5 election in Georgia.. One of the runoff consists of a Republican senator in office.
Somehow, the tightly divided House could provide Biden with the opportunity to get through the aisle and try to narrow down bipartisan deals with a centrist agenda that could appeal to some Republicans.
But so far, House Republican Party leader Kevin McCarthy has pointed to a move in the opposite direction. He wants to use basic procedures as a political weapon to end Republican priorities and force vulnerable Democrats to vote hard.
Republicans used the strategy with some success in the current session of Congress, producing campaign announcements against Democrats seeking re-election. McCarthy, his own shot to seize the majority of Republicans in 2022, has already arrived, warning shortly after the November election that there would be more battles on the ground.
McCarthy said that while Republicans will not have a majority in the new year, “they will get the word out.”
To block those efforts, Democrats are considering the rule changes proposed by Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla., That would raise the threshold for those votes to a two-thirds majority to make it harder for Republicans to change accounts.
Still, the first legislation in the new Congress may not be too difficult for Pelosi to pass, even with a smaller majority.
The agenda is likely to take root from HR 1 to HR9 – the first nine bills in the last Congress -, popular democratic measures on voting rights, lower prices for prescription drugs, higher minimum wage and requirement for verification of background for the purchase of weapons that most Democrats already have voted in favor.
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Associated Press writer Alan Fram contributed to this report.