When the 118th Congress convenes on 3 January, Republicans will control the House of Representatives for the first time in four years after meeting the required 218 seats necessary to form a majority in last week’s midterm elections.
The GOP needed to gain just five seats held by Democrats to wrest control of the House from Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her caucus, and while a significant number of races remain uncalled, they have now won a majority of seats in the lower chamber, with many of the gains coming from gerrymandered districts drawn by Republican-controlled state legislatures.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, the man most likely to garner the required 219 votes to be Speaker of the House in the next Congress, celebrated the GOP win on Twitter on Wednesday night, proclaiming, “Americans are ready for a new direction, and House Republicans are ready to deliver.”
“I’m proud to announce the era of one-party Democrat rule in Washington is over,” Mr McCarthy said the day before, after he was nominated to be the next Speaker.
In a statement, President Biden congratulated the Republicans on their victory and emphasised that the midterms were a repudiation of election deniers repeating Donald Trump’s false claims.
“Last week’s elections demonstrated the strength and resilience of American democracy. There was a strong rejection of election deniers, political violence, and intimidation,” Mr Biden said. “There was an emphatic statement that, in America, the will of the people prevails.”
The president added he was “ready to work with House Republicans to deliver results for working families.”
Several of the newly Republican seats that will give the GOP control of the House are in Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis personally intervened in the Sunshine State’s redistricting process to ensure that the map would be extremely favourable to his party.
Republicans also gained numerous seats in places where a majority of voters elected President Joe Biden just two years ago, with races in Democratic strongholds such as New York falling into the GOP column for the first time in many years after courts rejected a congressional map that would have favoured the Democratic Party by a large margin.
Republican candidates in the Empire State massively outperformed expectations in a state where Democratic voters outnumber Republicans two to one. On Long Island alone, Republicans gained four House seats.
New York congressman Sean Patrick Maloney, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, lost his re-election to a Republican after moving into a newly drawn district after the state’s redistricting process.
Still, it was far from the “red wave” anticipated by Republicans, with embattled Democrats in critical races managing to protect their seats as voters – particularly young people and women – rejected far-right campaigns on abortion rights, Mr Trump’s looming precense and the GOP’s worryingly antidemocratic agenda.
Democratic candidates also maintained control of the US Senate by flipping a Pennsylvania seat and scoring victories in critical battleground states, with a runoff election in Georgia between incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker set for 6 December.
The change in party control of the House also means a change in leadership.
Mr McCarthy is expected to gain the speaker’s gavel with support from the most extreme members of Congress, including far-right congressmembers Paul Gosar of Arizona and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. Both were removed from committees by the Democratic majority in the last Congress, but the two extremist members have said they expect Mr McCarthy to reward them with assignments on plum committees such as the House Judiciary and Oversight panels.
The Republican takeover of the House could mean that President Biden and some of his cabinet will be ensnared in impeachment proceedings over the next two years, as many of Mr McCarthy’s members have expressed a desire to gain a measure of revenge for the two impeachment trials of former president Donald Trump by impeaching the Democratic president and others.
Many of the new Republican members-elect are staunch Trump loyalists who gained his favour by repeating his widely discredited lies about the 2020 presidential election.
Ms Greene has suggested that the GOP will aggressively wield the subpoena power, putting favourite Republican targets like Joe Biden and his son Hunter in the crosshairs.
“We have to have the gavel,” the Georgia rep said on Tuesday. “That is extremely important, because the gavel means subpoena power. And Republicans need subpoena power going over the next two years.”
