I’m surprised that a former Member of Congress–Steve Israel, in a piece in The New Republic –has made the same mistake that a journalist did, as I explained in a previous ELB post .

The mistake is to think that Mike Johnson, as the current Speaker of the House, will have the power as Speaker to prevent the Democrats from becoming the majority party in the House after next year’s midterms if the Democrats are certified by state officials to have won enough seats to be in the majority on January 3, 2027.

Israel writes: “the final arbiter of [House] elections is the speaker of the House” and cites the example of the “Bloody Eighth” involving a 1984 election to a House seat from Indiana (about which I write in Ballot Battles ). But this is true only after the House has organized it

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