Melting Away
The House Republican majority is disappearing before our eyes
House Republicans started this congressional session with a 220-215 majority, one of the slimmest in history.
This week it got much smaller.
On Monday, Marjorie Taylor Greene resigned from Congress following her break-up with Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. A special election to choose a successor in her deep-red Georgia district will take place on March 10.
That reduces the Republican majority to 219 for at least the next nine weeks.
That same day, seven-term Republican congressman Doug LaMalfa died unexpectedly. The 65-year-old Californian represented the northern part of the state.
That reduces the Republican majority to 218.
California Governor Gavin Newsom has two weeks to set a date for a special election to replace LaMalfa, which will be no earlier than mid-May—although Newsom has every incentive to push it off as far as possible into the 140-day window for a new election established by California law.
And any Republican running in that election should expect to have one of the shortest congressional careers in history, as the re-mapping of California in response to the Republican gerrymander ploy in Texas has turned LaMalfa’s red district blue with the inclusion of liberal Bay Area voters.
The special election will take place under the old district lines. But in the likely event that no candidate receives 50% of the vote, there will have to be a runoff election which likely would not happen until November—at the same time voters in the new district are choosing their representative for next year.
So if a Republican is elected to fill LaMalfa’s seat, they will probably be sworn in next November and serve for two months.
But that’s not all.
