Thought it would be nice to have a thread for general updates on what’s going on in Congress that could be updated as appropriate.
My initial offering:
So I was looking at the House races on CNN and they’re saying that the Democrats have a net loss of 5 and the Republicans have a net gain of 6. The lack of symmetry jumped out at me.
Justin Amash of Michigan’s 3rd district, former Republican / current Libertarian, decided to step down and not seek re-election. This accounts for the apparent discrepancy. Libertarians have a net loss of 1 and the GOP picked up the seat.
Too bad; it was nice to have a Libertarian in the House. Would’ve been even nicer if he’d run as a Libertarian and won. But he didn’t. He ran as a Republican in 2018 and switched parties after the election, with a stopover as an Independent before joining the Libertarians.
I see the AP has 218-202 for the Ds this morning. So they “semi-officially” kept their majority. Still, a big disappointment after the polling predictions that they would gain seats.
The next D speaker (probably Pelosi) will have to hold virtually 100% of the D members to get the gavel.
I don’t know whether the GOP forced Amash out, or if Amash resigned the party as a result of the cheetle stains upon the GOP. Once he resigned the party, he did lose all his committee appointments, and he did eventually sign up with the Libertarian Party before opting to neither run as an LP candidate for President or his House seat.
I think you are right, once he left the party they kicked him out of other things. That makes sense. Agree though it would have been better off to have him around and someone else leave like Gaetz or Jordan.
