There goes another one! On Friday, Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher, who had already said he wouldn’t seek reelection, decided that he didn’t want to spend the next nine months in Congress either. And once Gallagher resigns his seat in northern Wisconsin on April 19, House Speaker Mike Johnson’s margin for error will shrink to just a single vote—almost two weeks earlier than we previously expected it to.
With Colorado’s Ken Buck saying adios on Friday, the House GOP caucus now stands at just 218 members. But once Gallagher also makes his exit, that figure will drop to 217. Democrats, meanwhile, have 213 seats and have remained remarkably unified in the face of Republican anarchy.
That means that when Gallagher is gone, Johnson will be able to afford a maximum of one defection on any given vote as long as Democrats stick together. If as many as two Republicans join with Democrats, the result would be a 215-215 tie—and in Congress, a tie is the same as a defeat.
But wait! The news is about to get even worse for Johnson. Democrats are set to see their caucus increase on April 30 when a special election is held in a safely blue district in upstate New York. That won’t directly impact the topline math, but it will make the GOP’s life even harder, because there are almost always absences on the House floor.
Three vacant Republican seats, meanwhile, won’t be filled until special elections in May and June—but this is where it gets better still: Gallagher’s seat won’t be filled until November.
Under Wisconsin law, if a seat becomes vacant after the second Tuesday in April, then a special election to fill it gets consolidated with the state’s regularly scheduled elections. Gallagher could have avoided this by making his resignation take effect a couple of weeks sooner, but the fact that he didn’t has to make you wonder whether his timing was deliberate.
So in the best-case scenario, Johnson will have no better than a 220-214 advantage until the final two lame-duck months of this Congress. And that’s only if there are no more early departures.
Right after announcing his own resignation less than two weeks ago, Buck warned in an interview with Axios, "I think it's the next three people that leave that they're going to be worried about." With Gallagher pulling the rip-cord, it sure seems like Buck knew what he was talking about. And if there really are more quits in the pipeline, things are about to get really interesting.
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