119th Congress

While the Presidential race has been decided, a number of congressional races are still having ballots counted. The Republicans will have at least 52 Senators with three as of yet undecided contests. The House is not as clear, with the Republicans currently ‘holding’ 212 seats to the Democrats 197. According to projections by TheHill.com, we should end up with 222 Republicans to 213 Democrats. It currently looks like the Republicans will ‘control’ both the House and the Senate, as well as the White House.

‘Control’ of the Senate is iffy at best. Under the current rules it still takes 60 votes to pass legislation in the Senate, so 53 votes is short of control. Admittedly, those rules could change. It would only take a majority vote (and Vice President Vance would get to break any tie votes in the 119^th session of the Senate) to remove or further limit the cloture rule (that rule to limit debate is what currently sets the 60-vote threshold for legislation). The Democrats were not able to garner the 50 votes in the 118^th to modify that rule. It remains to be seen if the Republicans will try (depends on their frustration threshold, and we know President Trump is likely to have a very low frustration threshold) to modify that rule and if there will be sufficient moderate restraint to prevent such changes. I would not be surprised to see modifications to allow a lower threshold on specific issues (immigration probably being the first to be changed).

The composition of the House will not be significantly different than the 118^th House. I suspect that the Republican fringe that caused so many problems for the Speakers in the 118^th, will not cause quite so many in the 119^th, as they are more closely aligned with the new President, but they will certainly not be under the control of their Speaker (probably Rep Johnson, but that vote next week is not necessarily secure yet). There will almost certainly be some defections from moderate Republicans on some of the more radical proposals that may come to the floor, but that will not be as organized as was the fringe in the 118th.

One thing is clear, though, the 119^th Congress will cut spending. Where, and how much remains to be seen, but the House will have a much greater say in spending decisions than they did in the 118^th. The cuts will almost certainly not be as severe as some of the hardliners (including Trump) will want (Congresscritters still need to bring home the bacon to keep being re-elected), but they will be painful in many (maybe most) places. There will be some internal fights over defense and space spending, those two areas will not face significant reductions, but most of the remainder of the Federal bureaucracy will be affected.

Two programs of interest here are going to be severely affected. The CFATS program will not be renewed, and the Trump budget will disassemble any remnants of that program that remain. The Chemical Safety Board will very likely face severe budget cuts, maybe even be formally disbanded (which would require congressional action).

CAVEAT – please read my earlier post about political predictions, those comments apply here as well.