Why The House Is Supporting Trump’s Anti-Certification Push More Than The Senate
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.