Republicans won a narrow majority in the US House of Representatives, which gives them the power to halt US President Joe Biden’s agenda.
However, their slim margin marked a letdown for a party that had counted on decisive election results as a springboard for the 2024 presidential race.
More than a week after election day, the party gained the minimum 218 seats needed to control the chamber, when incumbent US Representative Mike Garcia defeated Democrat Christy Smith in California. About six races remain undecided.
Photo: Reuters
Despite concerns about Biden’s handling of the economy and the prospects of a recession, voters delivered a split verdict over who was to blame and how much weight to put on issues such as abortion rights. While giving control of the House to Republicans, the Senate remains in the hands of Democrats.
Slender as the majority is, Republicans can control committees with subpoena authority, allowing the party to fulfill campaign pledges to investigate Biden’s administration and family, as well as social-media companies that conservatives claim are biased against them.
Republicans also have promised to slash government spending, expand fossil fuel production and extend Trump-era tax cuts on the wealthy. However, much of that agenda could wither in the Democratic-controlled Senate.
Photo: AP
For businesses, the return of Republican control of the House takes the possibility of corporate tax increases favored by Democrats off the table, while diminishing the chances of reforms to legal immigration.
However, markets could become turbulent in the middle of next year if Republicans carry through on threats to hold the nation’s debt ceiling hostage to force the president to accept spending cuts.
Biden, on his way back to Washington from the G20 summit in Indonesia, said he would work with House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy.
“I congratulate Leader McCarthy on Republicans winning the House majority, and am ready to work with House Republicans to deliver results for working families,” the president said in a statement.
“Republicans have officially flipped the People’s House! Americans are ready for a new direction, and House Republicans are ready to deliver,” McCarthy wrote on Twitter.
McCarthy has spent the past week brooding over his party’s poor showing in the midterm elections, with some Republicans blaming former US president Donald Trump for losses in key races, not only in Congress, but in statehouses as well.
Yet even as they chided him for promoting candidates that Democrats beat in Republican-favored races, Trump waded right back in to announce his third run for the White House.
The Senate is to remain under Democratic control after John Fetterman flipped a Republican seat in Pennsylvania and incumbents Mark Kelly and Catherine Cortez Masto won re-election in Arizona and Nevada.
The Senate race in Georgia between Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock and Republican incumbent Herschel Walker is to be decided in a Dec. 6 runoff vote.
Biden’s agenda is likely to be largely stalled by the Republican win, but the victory was one of the smallest gained by either party in a midterm election in modern times.
The chair of the right-wing Freedom Caucus, US Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, said that conservatives could use the election results to at least extract promises from McCarthy, including changes in the rules governing how the House is run.
“As a leader in the party, you have a duty to provide a vision that informs voters of what you’re going to do if you win,” Perry said. “I don’t think that vision was adequately provided by multiple folks on the top of our party.”
Since World War II, the party holding the White House has, on average, lost 26 House seats and four Senate seats in midterm elections.
This year’s result spells the end of US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s position as the Democratic Party’s leader in the House, where a new generation of leaders is eager to ascend.
Pelosi hailed her party for having “defied expectations.”
“House Democrats will continue to play a leading role in supporting President Biden’s agenda — with strong leverage over a scant Republican majority,” she said in a statement on Wednesday.
The new Republican House majority was secured in part by victories in Democratic parts of New York State, where US Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, the head of the Democratic campaign arm, lost a race for a Hudson Valley seat.
An attempt by Democrats to gerrymander New York seats was rejected in court earlier in the year. Republicans also ousted Democratic incumbents in Florida, Iowa, Virginia and New Jersey to pick up seats.
Republican candidates who echoed Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud in 2020, and promised to take steps to ensure Republican wins in the future, were roundly defeated.
The election ends four years of Democratic control in the House, which saw passage of the largest infrastructure and climate change bills in history, a massive COVID-19 stimulus program, an overhaul of the Medicare drug benefit and a historic investment in US semiconductor manufacturing.
Republicans expected voters to punish Democrats with a loss of 60 or more seats as inflation hit 40-year highs and gasoline prices soared. However, only a few Democratic incumbents lost their re-election campaigns.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS