These are the numbers to think about in thinking about the chance that legislation to raise the debt ceiling can be passed, will pass in the Congress, the 2-house Congress.
They are 435,222, 218, 213, 210, 3, 4, 5, 1, 48, 43, 51 and 60 and for good measure, 7 and 9.*
Sounds like a multi-state lottery, doesn’t it? In fact it is. It is a 50-state lottery in which the winner or loser to be is 1 nation and 340 million of us, we Americans.
There are 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Republicans have 222 of them. George Santos sits in 1 of them.
Democrats hold 213 seats.
It takes 218 votes to pass a bill in the House, the simplest, barest majority. With Santos, the Republicans have 4 votes to spare, without him 3; and as 4 is 1 more than 3 he remains, because the Republicans need him. In 2 years Santos is likely to be in federal prison. For now he stays in the federal House.
The Democrats in any case are always 5 votes short of being able to control anything, except maybe on a very long shot this time.
The bill that is the basis for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s discussions with President Biden passed in April with that bare 218 votes, all Republicans of course.
The other 4 Republicans refused to vote for it, saying it was not enough. They declared they would never vote for anything less though by its very definition, somethng less is guaranteed to come out of the present negotiation.
The Speaker therefore needs every one of those 218 votes in his Conference, which he managed to get over the objections of many only by convincing them they needed to present a united front. It is telling that the last of the 218 to post a yes vote on the Speaker’s bill was Santos.
But the Speaker knows, the President knows, everyone knows that McCarthy cannot get 218 votes again, not hardly and that he will need votes from Democrats.
How many? One report says the White House calculates it could be as many as 100 Democrats needed to combine with what would be a rump of the Republican conference to get to 218. That is a lot. Indeed it is as big an ask as there is in politics -which is all about asking – to ask big numbers of Democrats to rescue against interest a fuddled, fumbling Republican conference.
So far 210 Democrats have signed what in the parlance of House rules is called a Discharge Petition, which is a device to move legislation to the floor. The petition seeks to force a vote on a bill called a “clean debt ceiling lift”, that is one with no conditions.
If a discharge petition gets 218 votes the legislation to which it pertains must be brought to a vote by the full House, even over the objection of the Speaker who otherwise controls what gets a vote.
At last report 3 Democratic signatures were missing, owing to absence from Washington not opposition to the petition. Effectively then the petition has 213 signatures.
Democrats thus need the signatures of 5 Republicans to bring the petition to bear and force a clean debt ceiling bill vote. The terms of such a bill would set a a new cap on the debt limit and define the period for which it would be valid, presumably at least past the 2024 presidential and congressional elections. No one who isn’t crazy wants to do this again in an election year, in any election year.
Does that mean any 5 Republicans could combine to negotiate separately with House Democrats and their leader, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York? Yes, and who knows but that could be going on in the background now, as likely as anything else. From reporting, there is not 1 much less are there 5 House Republicans who would support a clean debt ceiling lift. But could there be 5 willing to unite behind and talk with Democrats about less onerous demands than McCarthy is pressing?
Are there 5 such Republicans? Maybe Mr. Jeffries knows, we sure don’t. But if the aroma of any such talks is in the air in D.C., so far the bloodhounds of the Washington Press corps and the cable TV news chatterers and clamorers have not scented so much as a whiff of it.
Ok, so far we have covered and explained the significance in all this of 435, 222, 218, 213, 4, 3 and 5. What about 1?
Among the concessions to the extremists in his already extreme party to get their votes on a 15th ballot to elect him Speaker, McCarthy agreed that if so much as 1 member of the House requested reconsideration to remove him from the speakership, it would be enough to cause the full House to take up the question. So his 4 vote majority is, really, sort of just 1 vote.
This makes him? Choose your bad analogy: A lion without a roar, an empty vessel, a toothless tiger, a 55 pound lightweight, a shadow of a man, a dog with no bite, humpty dumpty on the wall. You get the idea. Everyone knows already McCarthy can’t deliver even if no one, including him, yet knows what it is he will finally take back to his conference. Any way you cut it, he doesn’t have and won’t have the votes of 218 Republicans, not nearly.
Then there is the Senate. As to that august body, think of this as a poker hand. I’ll see you a Sinema, raise you a Manchin and hope you don’t have a McConnell up your sleeve and a 9 tops everything.
That is because Democrats presumably have 51 of the Senate seats or 51 votes anyway counting 48 Democrats and 3 independents, 1 of whom is the always unpredictable Kirsten Sinema of Arizona while 1 of their own is the man ever poised behind your back, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin – both of them in tenuous reelection situations next year.
Another is Sen. Diane Feinstein of California who in a harsh but necessarily realistic assessment is here today, sort of, but might not be tomorrow. Cruel? Washington is a very cruel place.
But – but the fillibuster. Oh right there’s that.
To take up any bill to bring the debt ceiling to a vote requires 60 votes in the Senate. Only then can it be passed by a simple majority of 51 votes. The last time it was raised in 2021, Senate Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, making one of his usual surgical political calculations, waived the 60 vote requirement and the debt ceiling was raised with Democratic votes only at a time when Democrats controlled both houses.
Ask yourself, why would 9 Republicans vote yes so they could then vote no and lose? Makes no sense right? Right.
Because on this 9 of the 49 Senate Republicans have to be persuaded to yes and no more than 40 can vote no to get a debt ceiling increase of any kind passed by the Senate. Still, only 1 of them, McConnell, has the influence to make that happen if he chooses and is satisfied. So far he has been and is silent.
Right now 43 Republicans have declared they will oppose a vote on a debt ceiling without conditions to which they agree. So even if 5 Republicans join 213 Democrats to get a vote and then pass a clean debt ceiling bill or even one with lesser conditions in the House, it is, as they say in Washington, dead on arrival in the Senate unless 9 Republicans agree to join 48 Democrats and 3 independents to get to 60.
But at best there are only 7 Republicans who so far have not declared themselves on that one. So, another number, unlucky 7, which even if it could be added to theirs only gets Democrats to 58, 2 too short.
These then are the many, many, many numbers and equations bouncing around in the talks between the House majority, mind you a decidedly slim majority, and the White House with the filibuster flim flam bound Senate watching and waiting.
But they are not mere numbers on paper, they are not just an equation to be or that can be solved by math.
These numbers are incarnate, they are people – and people in this situation who are politiicans, who might very well not be able to get to the 2 most important numbers- 218 and 60 – no matter how they calculate.
Dauting, isn’t it?
-0-
* It is customary in writing style to spell out single digit numbers except for this writing the numerical figures have been used for consistency and emphasis.
Peeling the Onion 