There are Majorities and then there are Hellbent Majorities

Size matters, but so does intensity

UPDATE (4/7): Luna has folded and gone for the face-saving deal! Whatever else anyone might say, paired voting isn’t proxy voting, and its not even close.

Looks like Johnson was able to break her hellbent majority, likely by raising the stakes and finding out that at least some of her coalition wasn’t actually hellbent on getting the proxy voting.

*******

If you hang around Capitol Hill for more than like 3 seconds you will inevitably hear someone say something like “the House is a majoritarian body” or “it’s a numbers game and the number is 218” or “if you have 218, you can do do whatever you want in the House.”

All of those things are true and provide an important insight about how the House functions (especially in comparison to the Senate).

But I try to be very careful about the last one, because that one is only true if you include an important qualifier. “If you have a hellbent 218, you can do whatever you want in the House.”

And that’s because majorities come in all different intensities, and any intensity less than “hellbent” can easily find itself unable to do whatever it wants. If they are truly hellbent, there’s nothing you can do. Anything less, and opponents will have potential procedural and political opportunities to break the majority.

And so an important part of legislative politics is finding out just how hellbent potential majorities that you oppose actually are.

This plays out all the time in the House of Representatives, but often it’s hard to see it in real-time, as the politics and process for assessing and breaking these majorities is often very opaque.

I’m bringing it up now because the House is in the throes of a battle that is unusually and explicitly about testing the intensity of a proven majority, in a fight over whether to allow proxy voting for Members who are the parents of young infants.

Majorities come in all levels of intensity

It’s utterly obvious and trivial to assert that both individuals and groups can be in favor of something at varying levels of intensity. Imagine a citizen who is in favor, for example, of a handgun ban. Here are some sample levels of intensity they might bring to the issue:

• They have literally never thought about the issue in their life, and then someone asked them if they were in favor of a handgun ban, they said yes, and they never thought about it again;

• Same as previous level, except they’ve also thought about it independently of being asked;

• Same as previous level, except they’ve also tried to persuade someone about it when it was brought up in a group conversation;

• Same as previous level, except they have brought it up in a group conversation;

• Same as previous level, except they also consider it when voting in elections;

• Same as previous level, except it’s one of their top issues when voting;

• Same as previous level, except its’ their only issue when voting;

• Same as previous level, but they also expend significant resources to influence the issue: donating money to campaigns, organizing voters, lobbying elected officials

• Same as previous level, except they have dedicated their life to it: the majority of their time is spent in advocacy or fundraising around the issue

The exact same thing is true for potential legislative coalitions. The Members in the coalition may:

• favor something as a vague idea if you talk to them in private in their office

• be willing to vote for something if it is brought to the floor

• be willing to expend effort to make it come to the floor

• be willing to expend significantly political resources to get it on the floor

• be willing to sacrifice other future objectives to get it on the floor

• be willing to endure serious political costs to get it on the floor

• be willing to lose their reelection to get it on the floor

Underlying this is a basic principle of politics: to do something, you need both the votes and the will to do it. Every concentrates on the votes, but often the missing ingredient is the will. Yes, as soon as you have 218 you have a majority that can’t be stopped. But that’s only if there are no other political considerations.

The foreign aid bills that sat around much of late 2023 and 2024 were excellent examples of this. It passed overwhelmingly in the Senate. The votes were obviously there in the House. But it didn’t move for months. And that’s because many members of the majority coalition had other, cross-cutting political considerations.

Nothing happens in a vacuum in a legislature, or in politics generally. Forcing the foreign aid bill onto the floor against the wishes of the party leaders might have cost some Members of that majority coalition any number of things: allies, favors, electoral support, agenda space for stuff they care *more* about, good will from the leadership, and so forth.

And so the gap in the House for individual Members between “what you will vote for if forced to vote” and “what will you demand gets voted on” is enormous. It’s politically costly to make things happen, and it uses up a lot of resources.

Speaker Johnson vs. The Proxy Voting Majority

Enter proxy voting for young parents.

There’s a bipartisan movement in the House to allow parents of young infants to vote by proxy from their districts, so they don’t have to bring the child to DC or leave the child home while they come to DC for votes. Representatives Luna (R-FL) and Petterson (D-CO) have introduced a resolution that would allow this during the first 12 weeks after giving birth (or after a Member’s spouse has given birth).

Speaker Johnson, however, hates this idea. He thinks it is unconstitutional (I disagree with that) and he thought the House’s experience with proxy voting for health reasons during COVID was not great (I agree with that; Members abused it to get out of coming to DC). In any case, he blocked the inclusion of the proxy voting provisions from the rules package for the 119th Congress, and subsequently has actively opposed brining the resolution to the floor.

Luna and Petterson (correctly) perceived that there was majority support for the proxy voting resolution. If they could get it to the floor, they would almost certainly win. 218 votes would be there.

But were there 218 votes to get it to the floor, against the wishes of the Republican leadership? That’s a question of will. Is the proxy voting majority hellbent on doing this, or will other considerations—not royally pissing off the leaders, namely—prove more important?

The House has traditionally been run by majority parties who cede strong agenda-setting control to leaders. That is, a procedural coalition forms, where backbenchers support leadership agenda choices even if they don’t like them, because the benefits they get from the leaders (committee assignments, an articulated party program, election help, protection from tough votes, earmarks, etc) outweighs the cost of occasionally not getting their preferred legislation on the floor and occasionally having bills on the floor they oppose.

This traditional dynamic has broken down quite a bit in the last few Congresses. Narrow Republican majorities and the hardball-playing Freedom Caucus faction has created a dynamic in which first Speaker McCarthy and now Speaker Johnson has something less than a stable procedural coalition; the support of a partisan majority is not guaranteed for the leadership on agenda-setting votes.

It’s tough to say whether this climate in the House has emboldened Luna to push forward on the proxy voting. But my guess is that it has.

At any rate, Luna and her allies did what you do when you think you have a strong-willed majority in the House but the leadership is blocking you from the floor: they filed a discharge petition in mid-Marc (for technical procedural reasons, they filed the petition on a special rule rather than on the proxy voting resolution itself). If 218 Members publicly sign that petition—which they did—the proxy voting resolution can be forced onto the floor and the leadership cannot stop it.

This is remarkable. Discharge petitions rarely succeed. In the 21st century, only 5 have gotten 218 signatures. Notably, three of those happened in the last 15 months. Leaders hate them, because they directly undermine the agenda-setting procedural coalition that the leadership wishes to control. Majority-party Members fear signing them both because they want to stay in good favor with the leadership, and also because when you sign on publicly, you don’t even know if the petition is going to get to 218. You might earn the scorn of leadership and still not get your policy.

As is often the case, the 218 coalition that signed the discharge petition for proxy voting is almost all of the minority (Democrats have no concerns about upsetting the agenda control of the GOP leadership!) and 9 Republican Members. Immediately after the petition crossed the finish line, the Speaker said he was researching ways to still prevent a vote.

From a purely procedural point of view, there’s nothing to research. The Speaker is cooked. People keep bringing me zany ideas about how you can stop 218 people from doing something in the House if you don’t have the votes. No, it won’t work to report the rule before they discharge it. No, it won’t work to amend the rule at the Rules Committee and then report it. If they are truly hellbent on doing this, then you are the one in danger, since their next move could always be to remove you as Speaker and install one of their own.

What the Speaker meant—and maybe what he should have said—was that he was researching ways to increase the cost for those 9 Republicans to go through with actually bringing this to the floor. What he needs to know is whether they are actually hellbent on doing this, or if there’s some level of reward or punishment that might break the coalition. Can anyone be bought up? Can anyone be persuaded that the cost is too high?

The Speaker Has No Clothes?

The problem Johnson has is that the 9 Republicans who signed onto the discharge petition have, in some sense, already demonstrated a high degree of will by signing the discharge petition. That’s already pretty high up the chain—it would normally mean landing yourself in the Speaker’s doghouse. That can be a problem for any House Member looking to achieve things, policy or politics.

But here’s the thing: now that the Freedom Caucus has ripped off the band-aid over the last year and a half, I’m not sure various would-be factions of the GOP are as scared of crossing the leaders. Especially when they too hold the balance of power.

This isn’t to say Johnson has conceded. He hasn’t. He’s still doing things to raise the cost of supporting the discharge petition. Earlier this week, the leadership brought a rule to the floor on unrelated legislation that also included a provision that would have neutered the proxy voting discharge petition. It was a dare to each of the 9 Republicans who support discharge: will you torpedo the House agenda this week and piss everyone off, just to save your proxy voting resolution?

They did exactly that. The rule failed. And Johnson cancelled legislative activity in the House for the rest of the week, so that the proxy voting resolution would not ripen and be eligible to come up for business. Now there are rumors he might try to put a similar provision into the rule for consideration of the budget resolution. Will the rebels stop the reconciliation process on the president’s agenda to save your discharge petition?

The problem, however, is Johnson is the one who is starting to look weak. Everyone can see through this charade, and instead of making other Republicans annoyed at the 9 who are voting against these unrelated rules, it’s making them annoyed at Johnson for not just giving in and allowing the proxy voting. He’s starting to look like the person who can’t control the agenda.

My hunch is that Johnson will fold next week in short order. Trump came out in favor of the proxy voting yesterday, and that means the 9 GOP signers of the discharge petition aren’t going to face any real political pressure to abandon their position. They will ultimately have the ire of the speaker going forward when they need a favor, but they are going to get their resolution, one way or another. Johnson may yet be able to cut a face-saving deal to alter the legislation modestly, but he’s just not going to be able to stop it.

Just to bring things full circle, when the proxy voting resolution hits the floor, there’s a good chance there are going to be more than 218 votes for it. Maybe a lot more. Because sitting on the sidelines all this time are Members who are willing to vote for it once it gets to the floor, but unwilling to pay the costs of being the people who force it onto the floor.