A Congress without clear majorities that will need consensus

The Washington Capitol, in a file image. J.

Scott Applewhite / AP

In an election in which it has been necessary to wait from Tuesday, November 3 until this Saturday to know the name of the man who will occupy the White House, the leaders of Congress have entered - unwantedly - in a similar dynamic in which each of them seem to feel like a winner when there are results to come and seats to fill.

Some of them not before January 5, as is the case with senators from Georgia.

For now, the last elections have been a milestone in representativeness and equality in the country, with almost twice as many transgender or non-binary representatives elected and a record number of women in the House of Representatives.

More than 132 women, almost a dozen of them Latina, will take part in the 117th Congress that will open in January.

When all counts are finished, Congress will have very tight majorities that will force consensus to be reached or, as recent history has shown, will lead to a partisan shutdown in which no positions will be moved to the detriment of citizens and the country.

Of the total of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives, which are renewed in their entirety every four years, several dozen remain to be resolved, but everything indicates that Nancy Pelosi, the president, will have the smallest majority since 2002. The same could happen in as regards the Senate, where the majority leader, the newly re-elected Republican Mitch McConnell, is waiting for what happens in North Carolina and Alaska - which, unless surprisingly, will fall on the Republican side.

However, the two Georgia seats are awaiting the result of the vote and must, by law, since no candidate has reached 50% of the ballots, face a special election to be held on January 5.

If those seats were finally Democrats, the composition would be 50-50, a tie in which the decision to resolve the votes will be in the hands of the vice president, Kamala Harris.

That is why the election facing Republican Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue versus Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Osssof is vital for Biden's presidency.

What is clear is that the Democrats will not achieve a majority in the Upper House.

And if they achieved a tie, Biden would begin his presidency as George W. Bush did in 2001. Bush, despite losing the popular vote to Al Gore and with an election that the Supreme Court ultimately decided, reached the Oval Office with a tie in the Senate.

However, with an experienced cabinet inherited from his father's time, the Bush Jr. Administration succeeded with Democratic support for very important legislation, such as a tax cut and an education law that affected students from the age of five to the doors of University.

In the House of Representatives, the group led by Nancy Pelosi has lost four seats so far and the Republicans have added five to their number.

In the presidential elections, all 435 seats in the lower house are always renewed, while in the Senate only one third of the total 100 seats is changed every two years.

Of the 2016 election, Democrats had 232 seats compared to 197 for Republicans.

According to figures from the Associated Press, at the moment the Democrats would have 214 seats compared to 196 for the Republicans, although only 410 of the total are assigned.

The final figure will take days to be known yet.

Those who resist in the US Capitol are whom Donald Trump usually refers to disparagingly as AOC + 3 (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and three other young representatives).

They are known as the squad.

And they repeat.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, from New York;

Ilhan Omar, from Minnesota;

Rashida Tlaib, from Michigan;

and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts are the nightmare of the most conservative Republicans, who call them communists.

Against

(the squad, in English), Trump has not spared macho or xenophobic attacks.

Congratulations to President-elect Joe Biden & Vice President-elect Kamala Harris!

- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) November 7, 2020

This Capitol brings several firsts.

In Missouri, an African-American congresswoman has won a seat in this white state for the first time.

Cori Bush will be the first African-American woman to represent that state in more than 170 years.

"I am the first nurse who will go to the House for Missouri, in the middle of a pandemic," wrote the legislator on Twitter.

The conspiracy theory that no one has paid much attention to already has space in the House of Representatives.

QAnon, born on the darker side of the internet, had the go-ahead from the Trump White House.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, a representative from Georgia who considers the current Republicans "soft", will be the spokesperson.

In Delaware, Sarah McBride, 30, will be the first trans senator in the United States.

"We did it.

We won the general election.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, ”Mc Bride tweeted after his triumph, which will inspire many.

"I hope tonight shows an LGBTQ kid that our democracy is big enough for them too."

When you swear in office, you will be the most authoritative transgender person in the country.

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