WASHINGTON — The 118th House of Representatives has been marked by its history-making moments: the first multiballot speaker election in 100 years, the first speaker ever to be voted out of office and the first member expelled without a conviction since the Civil War.
While Republicans have had a narrow majority through it all, they’re entering another history-making moment this week: one of the smallest House majorities ever.
House Republicans have lost three members since December, with the expulsion of Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., the resignation of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and Rep. Bill Johnson’s, R-Ohio, departure this week to start a new job as the president of Youngstown State University. Republicans hold 219 seats to Democrats’ 213, giving new Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., little margin for error to pass legislation.
With Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., out until February for treatments related to his blood cancer diagnosis, that shrinks the majority even further.
Since the House was set at 435 members in 1913, some narrow majorities have faced difficulty getting bills passed while others achieved legislative success. Some have even seen the balance of power shift to the opposing party — though never in the middle of a session. Here’s what history can teach us about a closely divided House.
1917: A coalition majority
Election day in 1916 came and went without a clear indication of whether President Woodrow Wilson had been re-elected or which party would control the lower chamber of Congress. “HOUSE MAY BE A TIE,” read the New York Times headline the following day.
By the end of the week, Wilson had clinched a second term but the House was still a toss-up. While Republicans had 215 seats to 214 for Democrats, neither party had a majority because of a few seats that were held by minor parties. It was becoming clear that these minor party members-elect controlled the balance of power.
On the opening day of the 65th Congress on April 2, 1917, Congressman Thomas Schall of Minnesota, a self-described progressive Republican, rose to speak. “I have always been a Republican and still am a Lincoln Republican,” Schall said. But then he did something he said could lead to his “political death”: he nominated Democrat Champ Clark to be speaker, arguing that Wilson deserved a Democratic-controlled House as World War I raged on in Europe.
With the help of a few progressives and a socialist, Democrats were able to give Wilson just that, a coalition majority of 217 in the House. Clark was elected speaker and just hours later, Wilson arrived at the Capitol to ask Congress in a joint session address for a declaration of war against Germany.
It took the House a few days to debate the merits of war, but just after 3 a.m. on April 6, the body adopted only its fourth declaration of war ever on a vote of 373 to 50.
Even with a narrow majority, the 65th House was quite active in its legislative output. Congress passed the Selective Service Act in May 1917 that set up the draft, sent the 18th Amendment to the states prohibiting the sale of alcohol and passed multiple bills authorizing war bonds.
1931: Deaths flipped the balance of power
Similarly to what occurred 14 years earlier, it was unclear which party had won control of the House for a few days after the 1930 election. By the weekend after Election Day, it appeared that Republicans held a narrow majority with 218 seats to 216 for Democrats and one held by a member of the Farmer-Labor party, Rep. Paul Kvale of Minnesota.
Kvale’s answer to The Washington Star shortly after the election as to how he would vote for speaker proved prescient. He said seeing as the new session would not start for 13 more months and “knowing also that changes will inevitably take place in the personnel of members-elect,” it did not make sense for him to comment at the time. (Before the 20th Amendment was adopted in 1933, the term for a new Congress…
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