What Happened This Week In Washington — And Georgia

I should emphasize that I don’t actually know who is running for president in 2024. But there are figures in the GOP that many observers think are keeping the door open to run and I think it’s worth looking at this vote in that context.

Two of the most prominent figures in Congress who backed Trump’s bid to fight the certification, Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri, are both expected to explore 2024 presidential bids.

But other Republicans who are likely to flirt with 2024 bids did not join this effort. Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska was not unsurprising, because he has been critical of Trump in the past. Sen Mike Lee of Utah breaking with Trump was also not that surprising. Lee has not been as vocal as people like Sasse in terms of taking on the president on these kinds of questions around democratic values. At the same time, he has a fairly low Trump score. (He voted against Trump’s position more than all but six senators in 2019-2020, usually opposing government spending bills he feels are too large and trying to rein in executive power on foreign policy.). Sens Marco Rubio of Florida and Tim Scott of South Carolina I suspect were trying to figure out where the wind was blowing — and pro-Trump demonstrators effectively invading the Capitol likely moved them to break with Trump on this issue.

Perhaps the most surprising person to break with Trump was Sen. Tom Cotton, who aligned with the outgoing president on basically every major issue over the last four years, most notably on immigration policy.

Even before this certification debate, Lee and Sasse were never going to win the GOP nomination if it turned into a contest over who is the most Trump-like figure and most aligned with the president. But Cotton either seems to be betting this vote won’t matter much to his presidential prospects in terms of courting Trump-aligned GOP voters or just decided he will not take an overtly anti-democratic step to align himself with the president’s base. We’ll find out in a few years if this issue reverberates on the campaign trail.

Rep. Liz Cheney, who is the No. 3 Republican in the party’s leadership in the House, is expected to be the top Republican in that chamber to vote for certification. She is also a potential 2024 candidate. This is also not surprising. Over the last year, Cheney has become a vocal critic of Trump, both in terms of his breaking with democratic values and on foreign policy issues, where Cheney views Trump as insufficiently hawkish.

Down to just a handful of votes to go, with Republicans voting 122-79 in favor of objecting to Arizona’s Electoral College slate so far and Democrats 0-218 against.

Only six of 51 Senate Republicans joined the effort to question the voting results in Arizona. But while the House vote is not yet completely done, it is almost certain that a majority of House Republicans will align with Trump and object to Arizona’s votes. (The Arizona votes are a proxy for this broader certification issue and came up first because Congress goes through the states in alphabetical order.)

That’s not surprising. Republicans in the House, particularly since then-Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin retired after the 2018 elections, have been more aligned with Trump than the GOP bloc in the Senate. Both Ryan and McConnell had some tensions with the president. But Ryan’s successor as the top House Republican, Kevin McCarthy, has full-throatedly embraced Trump as the party’s leader.

Relatedly, rank-and-file members in each chamber tend to take cues from their leaders, and GOP leaders in the Senate were cooler to the anti-certification idea than in the House. The No. 2 Republican in the Senate leadership, John Thune of South Dakota, had publicly blasted the anti-certification move in the day leading up to Wednesday’s vote, and McConnell distanced himself from the effort this afternoon. In contrast, the two top House Republicans, McCarthy and Steve Scalise of Louisiana, were fairly circumspect before Wednesday and Scalise openly embraced the anti-certification push early on Wednesday.

Electoral considerations were also probably more of a consideration for House members than for senators — House members face the voters every two years, senators every six years — and thus GOP representatives have to be more worried about being challenged and defeated in a GOP primary than their Senate counterparts.

This dichotomy mirrors what happened last month regarding a lawsuit initiated by Republican officials in Texas that was aimed at getting the U.S. Supreme Court to reexamine the election results in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. More than half of House GOP members (126) signed a brief backing that lawsuit, but there was not a companion brief filed by GOP senators.

Looking ahead, Republicans are in the minority in the House, a chamber that doesn’t give the minority much power. So in the short term, Biden doesn’t have to think too much about House Republicans. But the majority of Republicans in the House questioning Biden’s win is ominous in a democratic sense: Would a GOP-controlled House be unwilling to certify a win by Biden or another Democratic presidential candidate in 2024?

On the flip side, an overwhelming majority of Senate Republicans didn’t question the election results. I interpret this to mean that the Senate Republicans as a bloc and McConnell in particular are not fully on board with Trump’s undermining of democratic norms. But I don’t think this move portends that Senate Republicans will necessarily work with Biden. I would expect they will oppose much of his agenda, just as they did under McConnell’s leadership when Obama was president.