Losing the House would end Trump’s agenda, not his presidency

Opinion

By Staff Reporter

WASHINGTON — Speaker Mike Johnson has a closing argument for Republican voters, and he has been making it since February. “If we lost the majority in the House, it would be the end of the Trump presidency in real effect,” he said on Newsmax after the State of the Union address, HuffPost reported. President Trump, he said, needs four years, “not just two.”

It is an effective turnout message. It is also, on the record of the last half-century, an overstatement. Losing the House would end the Trump legislative agenda. It would not end the Trump presidency, in effect or otherwise, and voters weighing the stakes deserve a more precise description of what would change.

The odds Johnson is fighting

Johnson’s warning is aimed at a familiar pattern. Since 1934, the president’s party has lost House seats in 20 of 23 midterm elections, according to data compiled by the American Presidency Project at UC Santa Barbara. The average loss across all 23 is 27 seats. The only gains came in 1934, 1998 and 2002. Trump lost 41 seats in 2018; Barack Obama lost 63 in 2010.

The same table lists Trump’s job approval at 33% in late August. Only Harry Truman, in 1946, matched or fell below that figure in the summer or fall of a midterm year. The latest ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll also has Trump at 33% and Democrats ahead by 8 points among likely voters, as The Inquisitor reported. Johnson himself now speaks of losing the majority as an “unlikely scenario,” and he told CBS News he would expect to stay on as Republican leader if it happens.

What divided government actually did to Trump the first time

There is a recent test case. Democrats took the House in 2018 and spent the next two years investigating Trump. In December 2019 they impeached him, in a resolution the Senate rejected. That is the outcome Republicans warn about, and it is a real one.

But the same divided Congress also sent Trump his trade agreement with Mexico and Canada, which became Public Law 116-113, and the CARES Act pandemic relief law. Trump vetoed 10 bills in his first term, all of them during those two years of divided government, including a resolution to end the national emergency he declared to build the border wall. The House failed to override that veto. Only one of the 10, the annual defense bill, was overridden.

Obama’s experience after 2010 was similar. A Republican House blocked most of his agenda and forced the spending caps in the Budget Control Act of 2011. Two years later, he won a second term with 332 electoral votes.

What would really change

A Democratic House would bring three concrete things: subpoena power over the executive branch, control over which spending bills reach the floor, and the ability to impeach. Each matters. The second is the most immediate, because every appropriations bill must pass the House. A Democratic majority could use that to fight over spending on the Iran war, immigration enforcement and the administration’s other priorities.

Even that power starts later than the campaign rhetoric suggests. The current Congress returns after the election facing a Dec. 11 government funding deadline, and the new House would not be sworn in until January.

What a Democratic House could not do is take away the powers Trump has relied on most in his second term: executive orders, foreign policy, command of the military and the veto. Those powers do not depend on who holds the gavel. A lost majority would cost the president his ability to pass laws and protect his administration from investigation. That is a serious loss. It is not the end of a presidency, and Johnson’s own interviews suggest he knows the difference.

Spokespeople for Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso, Sen. Ted Cruz and Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin did not immediately respond Tuesday to requests for comment on what a Democratic House would mean for the president. The Inquisitor could not find a published email address for the Speaker’s press office.

Photo: Speaker Mike JohnsonSpeaker Mike Johnson’s official portrait. United States Congress, via#8217;s official portrait. Ike Hayman, United States Congress, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.