This is an adapted excerpt from the December 4 episode of “The Beat with Ari Melber.”
In the November elections, Americans not only voted to retain Republican control of the US House of Representatives, but also gave the party control of the US Senate. For all the attention paid to the presidential race and Donald Trump’s victory, we must recognize that this is also Congress’s outcome enormous. Republicans in Washington now have the opportunity to set the national agenda in January.
While Republicans campaigned on issues like prices and immigration, and the new administration says it will tackle these issues, there are clear developments that show what Republicans in Congress actually plan to do with their newfound power.
The election may have affected the price of eggs, but it appears that Republican leaders are rushing to use their power to implement policies that are unrelated or even contradictory, such as scaling back support for seniors and health care for Americans of all ages.
On Tuesday, Republican Rep. Richard McCormick said “tough decisions” will have to be made on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. “There are hundreds of billions of dollars to be saved. We just have to have the courage to take on those challenges,” McCormick told Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business Network.
The reality is that cutting hundreds of billions from these programs, as McCormick suggested, would cost the American people far more than high prices and inflation. Seniors receive an average of nearly $2,000 in Social Security benefits per month. They have contributed to the program for decades. Cutting billions will hit them, and the country’s future seniors, hard.
On Wednesday, Democrats secured victory in California’s 13th District after weeks of counting votes. That means the Republicans won 220 seats compared to the Democrats’ 215, just a margin of five seats. However, that margin could shrink even further as Trump has already chosen two incumbent Republicans in the House of Representatives for his cabinet. Matt Gaetz also resigned from Congress last month after Trump picked him as attorney general. (Gaetz later withdrew from consideration and said he would not return to the House.)
It is also worth noting that Trump won by just over 1.5% in the popular vote, a small margin that does not appear to indicate a broad mandate to break the safety net. In fact, the mandate for supporting these programs is significant higher then support for Trump – or for other politicians like Vice President Kamala Harris.
Responding to economic elections by cutting programs that help people get through a tough economy is quite a contradiction. And even some Republicans are reportedly concerned about the political downsides of such cuts, which could impact at least 70 million Americans.
But that is part of the party plan. And what will the Republicans in Washington do with the billions they cut? They would move them from working-class seniors to the ultra-wealthy, with more tax cuts modeled on those of Trump’s first term. These cuts could disrupt the tax code, forcing working-class Americans to pay higher rates than billionaires.
To be clear, there are billionaires who support both parties, that’s just a fact, and Democrats have struggled with criticism that they aren’t doing enough for the working and working class. But over the past four years of the Biden-Harris administration, billionaires didn’t get a big tax break and those safety net programs didn’t get cut. So the economic contrast between the two parties is clear, even if taxes are not as important to Americans as prices.
While Trump may be trying to mislead voters about the size of his margin, Republicans in the House of Representatives apparently see no benefit in raising expectations with such limited control of the chamber. We must remember that Republicans started the current Congress with a slim majority. That slim majority led to a speaker’s fight and led to intense infighting and mutinies that still haunt the party to this day.
Come January, Speaker Mike Johnson will take office with a margin of just 217-215 since Trump plucked these three House members from Congress. That margin will eventually go back to five, but is still one of the smallest in the past century.
So if you remember one thing about what is unfolding now, remember this: While Trump continues to exaggerate his victory to the American people, Republicans in Congress, coming off the same election, are not participating. During a press conference on Wednesday, Johnson made it clear that the party has ‘nothing to spare’.
“All of our members know that,” Johnson said. “We talked about it today, as we do all the time, that this is a team effort and we all have to pull in the same direction.”
If someone rows in a different direction and only two or three people defect, the Republicans will not be able to pass their agenda items.
Allison Detzel contributed.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
