The Republican Majority in Congress Is an Illusion
The recriminations following the GOP’s health-care failure obscure a simple reality: The party doesn’t have as much power as its leaders thought it did.
Legislating is often described as more art than science, but it’s really just grade-school arithmetic: Bills either have the votes needed to pass, or they don’t.
Republicans have a president in the White House and a numerical majority in Congress—237 seats out of the 430 currently occupied in the House, and 52 out of 100 in the Senate. In theory, that’s enough to run the show. “Welcome to the dawn of a new unified Republican government,” an ebullient House Speaker Paul Ryan declared to reporters the week after the November election.
He was using the word
