This is an adapted excerpt from the Dec. 4 episode of “The Beat with Ari Melber.”
In November’s election, Americans not only voted to maintain Republicans’ control in the U.S. House, but they also put the party in control of the U.S. Senate. For all the attention paid to the presidential race and Donald Trump’s victory, we must acknowledge that the congressional outcome is huge. Republicans in Washington now have the chance to set the national agenda come January.
While Republicans campaigned on issues like prices and immigration, and the new administration says it will tackle those issues, there are clear developments showing what congressional Republicans actually plan to do with their newfound power.
The reality is, cutting hundreds of billions from these programs would cost the American people far more than high prices and inflation.
The election may have turned on the price of eggs, but it seems Republican leaders are rushing to use their power to pursue policies unrelated, or even contradictory, to that issue, like cutting support for seniors and health care for Americans of all ages.
On Tuesday, Republican Rep. Richard McCormick said “hard decisions” will need to be made on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. “There’s hundreds of billions of dollars to be saved. We just have to have the stomach to take those challenges on,” McCormick told Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business Network.
The reality is, cutting hundreds of billions from these programs, as McCormick suggested, would cost the American people far more than high prices and inflation. Seniors get an average of almost $2,000 in Social Security per month. They’ve paid into the program for decades. Slashing billions from it will hit them, or the country’s future seniors, hard.
On Wednesday, Democrats secured victory in California’s 13th District, following weeks of ballot counting. That means Republicans won 220 seats to Democrats’ 215, just a five-seat margin. However, that margin could shrink further since Trump has already chosen two sitting House Republicans for his Cabinet. Matt Gaetz also resigned from Congress last month after Trump selected him for attorney general. (Gaetz later withdrew from consideration and said he would not return to the House.)
It’s also worth noting Trump won by the popular vote by just over 1.5%, a narrow margin that would not seem to indicate a wide mandate for gutting the safety net. In fact, the mandate for supporting these programs is considerably higher than support for Trump — or for other politicians like Vice President Kamala Harris.
Indeed, responding to an economic election by cutting programs that help people through a tough economy is quite a contradiction. And even some Republicans are reportedly concerned about the political downsides of such cuts, which could impact at least 70 million Americans.
But that is part of the party’s plan. And what will Republicans in Washington do with those billions they cut? They would move them from working-class seniors to the ultra-wealthy, with more tax cuts modeled on those from Trump’s first term. These cuts could distort the tax code leaving working-class Americans paying higher rates than billionaires.
While Trump keeps overselling his victory to the American people, the Republicans in Congress, coming out of the same election, are not joining in.
To be clear, there are billionaires who back both parties, that’s just a fact, and Democrats have struggled with criticism that they don’t do enough for labor and the working class. But over the last four years of the Biden-Harris administration, billionaires did not get a big tax break and those safety net programs were not slashed. So the economic contrast between the two parties is clear, even if taxes are not as top of mind for Americans as prices.
However, while Trump may try to mislead voters about the size of his margin, House Republicans apparently see no upside in raising expectations with such narrow control over the chamber. We should remember, Republicans started the current Congress with a slim majority. That slim majority led to a speaker fight and sparked intense in-fighting and mutinies, which still haunt the party to this day. Come January, Speaker Mike Johnson is set to work with a margin as thin as 217-215 since Trump plucked those three House members out of Congress. That margin will eventually swing back to five but it’s still one of the narrowest in the past century. So if you remember one thing from what’s unfolding right now, remember this: While Trump keeps overselling his victory to the American people, the Republicans in Congress, coming out of the same election, are not joining in. During a news conference on Wednesday, Johnson made it clear the party has “nothing to spare.” “All of our members know that,” Johnson said. “We talked about that today, as we do constantly, that this is a team effort that we’ve got to all row in the same direction.” If anyone does row in a different direction and just two or three people defect, Republicans won’t be able to squeeze through their agenda items. Allison Detzel contributed.
Ari Melber
Ari Melber, an Emmy Award-winning journalist, writer and attorney, is the host of “The Beat with Ari Melber” airing nightly at 6 p.m. ET on MSNBC. He also serves as MSNBC’s chief legal correspondent and an NBC News legal analyst. Before joining MSNBC, Melber practiced First Amendment law and served as a legislative aide in the U.S. Senate. He received a J.D. from Cornell Law School and is a member of the New York Bar.
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