Axios:

House Democrats are pushing back furiously against a proposed change to House rules that would allow only Republicans to force a vote on removing the speaker of the House.

Why it matters: Top Democrats are arguing the move would inhibit bipartisanship and effectively make House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) answerable only to his members — not the entire House…

Driving the news: The 36-page rules package for the 119th Congress, unveiled on Wednesday, raises the threshold to introduce what is called a motion to vacate in multiple ways.

• Whereas in the last Congress, any single House member could introduce such a motion, now eight others have to co-sponsor the measure.
• But all nine of those lawmakers have to be members of the majority party — which will be the Republicans in this Congress.
• The rule change is part of a deal struck by House Republicans’ internal factions in November as the party renominated Johnson for speaker.

WSJ:

They won, but barely. 

Republicans held on to control of the House of Representatives in November by one of the thinnest margins in the country’s history—even smaller than in the current Congress—a result that will have them walking a tightrope again for the next two years. The drama starts next week when the party tries to elect a new speaker on the first day of the new session, with fresh grumblings about leadership setting the stage for an unpredictable vote.

Republicans won 220 seats to Democrats’ 215. One planned vacancy—that of former Rep. Matt Gaetz, who was elected to another term but said he won’t take office—will reduce Republicans to 219 when lawmakers reconvene on Jan. 3. Two resignations of lawmakers set to join the Trump administration—Reps. Elise Stefanik and Mike Waltz—will temporarily reduce GOP numbers to 217 later in January before special elections are held. President-elect Donald Trump starts his second term on Jan. 20.

While Republicans will have full control of Congress and the White House, the wafer-thin cushion in the House means any small handful of Republican defectors could trip up the GOP agenda by holding out for their leaders or their own terms. As the past two years have shown, it also means that a run of bad luck for Republicans—such as health setbacks or a string of resignations—could eat into the margin. 

“We know how to work with a small majority; that’s our custom now,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) told reporters earlier this month. “This is a team effort and we’ve got to all row in the same direction.”

At the extreme, Republicans could surrender the majority by attrition before the next election, something that actually happened in 1931, when Republicans lost a two-seat majority midway through then-President Herbert Hoover’s term….

NYT:

A historically long and divisive fight to choose one speaker. A near default on the federal debt, followed by a mutiny on the House floor and multiple government shutdown scares. The ouster of the speaker, followed by weeks of paralysis and another vicious fight over who should lead next.

For almost two years, House Republicans have barely been able to overcome their own intraparty feuding to keep the government functioning. But despite it all, they emerged on Wednesday night, when The Associated Press declared that Republicans had effectively won control of the House, with a wafer-thin majority almost identical to the one they have now.

The apparent success of their battle to keep control of the House of Representatives suggests that they paid little political price for the chaos and dysfunction they presided over, a period when Congress struggled to carry out even the basics of governing.

And it suggests that members of both parties overestimated how much voters would judge them by their job performance….

Politico:

Democrats in Congress for years have labeled Donald Trump an “insurrectionist,” impeached him for stoking violence on Jan. 6, 2021, and suggested he is constitutionally prohibited from returning to the White House.

But even as those lawmakers continue to doubt Trump’s eligibility for the presidency, they also say that if he wins at the polls, they don’t expect efforts to deny him his presidential electors on Jan. 6, 2025, when Congress meets to finalize the results.

Democratic leaders are saying publicly and privately they want a drama-free transfer of power — even if it means setting aside some members’ views that Trump is ineligible to return to the presidency because of the Constitution’s bar on insurrectionist officeholders.

The 14th Amendment prohibits any federal officeholders who have “engaged in” insurrection from holding office again, and Democrats have long suggested Trump ran afoul of it when he inflamed the violent mob that attacked the Capitol four years ago. At the time, House Democrats overwhelmingly voted to impeach Trump for “incitement of insurrection.” Their leader, Hakeem Jeffries, has routinely called Trump the “insurrectionist-in-chief.” But there appears to be little appetite among Democrats to challenge results during the Jan. 6 joint session.

“The integrity of our democratic process depends on the peaceful transfer of power. Donald Trump has decided that the only valid elections are elections he wins,” Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-Mass.) said in a statement to POLITICO. “He is the only President who has supported an insurrection rather than accept the will of the American people. Democrats will always ensure every vote counts and that we uphold our democracy.”…

In its March opinion, the Supreme Court implied — though didn’t explicitly state — that Congress must pass legislation to lay out a procedure to determine whether a current or former officeholder has violated the insurrection clause. It’s a gap that leaves some uncertainty about what Congress’ obligations and options are in January.

But most constitutional scholars say it would be improper for lawmakers to make a subjective judgment about Trump’s eligibility without a forum to fully air and debate the facts.

“Congress does not have the capacity in the [Jan. 6] joint session to do so,” said Derek Muller, a University of Notre Dame constitutional law expert. “Because Congress is not in a position to decide the matter, Congress should count the votes.”

Edward Foley, an Ohio State University constitutional scholar who has written about the insurrection clause, said the Supreme Court left a gap on this issue but doesn’t think members of Congress will step into the breach.

“Everything I’ve seen indicates that Democrats in Congress won’t attempt this,” Foley said.

In a hypothetical scenario in which Trump’s opponents controlled the House and Senate, with enough votes to disqualify his electors — “which they won’t have,” Foley noted — he said it’s unclear whether courts would step in to block the decision.

AP:

Justices on the Wisconsin Supreme Court said Wednesday that Gov. Tony Evers’ creative use of his expansive veto power in an attempt to lock in a school funding increase for 400 years appeared to be “extreme” and “crazy” but questioned whether and how it should be reined in.

“It does feel like the sky is the limit, the stratosphere is the limit,” Justice Jill Karofsky said during oral arguments, referring to the governor’s veto powers. “Perhaps today we are at the fork in the road … I think we’re trying to think should we, today in 2024, start to look at this differently.”

The case, supported by the Republican-controlled Legislature, is the latest flashpoint in a decades-long fight over just how broad Wisconsin’s governor’s partial veto powers should be. The issue has crossed party lines, with Republicans and Democrats pushing for more limitations on the governor’s veto over the years.

In this case, Evers made the veto in question in 2023. His partial veto increased how much revenue K-12 public schools can raise per student by $325 a year until 2425. Evers took language that originally applied the $325 increase for the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years and instead vetoed the “20” and the hyphen to make the end date 2425, more than four centuries from now.

“The veto here approaches the absurd and exceeds any reasonable understanding of legislative or voter intent in adopting the partial veto or subsequent limits,” attorneys for legal scholar Richard Briffault, of Columbia Law School, said in a filing with the court ahead of arguments…..

Politico:

Over the past 15 years, members of Congress have survived two near-deadly shootings, a train crash with dozens of them on board, and a Capitol riot that had hundreds of lawmakers fearing for their lives.

Despite those incidents, the institution is wholly unprepared for a catastrophic event that kills or incapacitates multiple members — even if that hypothetical tragedy results in a major power shift: changing which party holds the majority in the House or Senate.

Members of Congress themselves have proposed a host of solutions to the havoc a mass casualty could wreak. Those propositions range from a constitutional amendment allowing members to designate their own successors to simple rule changes to prevent violence from shifting party power. But a POLITICO review shows that both Republican and Democratic leaders, including chairs of key committees, have failed to significantly advance any of the ideas proposed since a mass shooting at a GOP baseball practice in 2017. That’s largely based on a reluctance to acknowledge the issue and a general resistance in Congress to changing rules.

That strikes many members as foolhardy.