Over the last two years, Republicans have controlled the U.S. House of Representatives by only a handful of seats – a margin so narrow that they ended up relying on Democrats to pass even their modest spending bills. Republican conservatives ousted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and struggled to elect an alternative, until finally settling on Rep. Mike Johnson.
Democratic Chris Deluzio, whose district includes Beaver County and many Allegheny County suburbs, said it made for a frustrating first term. “Republican majorities struggled with the basics of governing: funding the government, keeping the government open,” he said.
This term, House Republicans have an even smaller margin of control — but they also have a majority in the Senate and control of the White House. Republican Rep. Mike Kelly, whose district stretches from Butler County to Erie, says that means the onus will be on the GOP to pass tax cuts, cut spending, improve immigration enforcement, increase energy production and lower costs.
“When you're in the majority, you have a great responsibility to actually govern,” Kelly said. “When you're in the minority, all you have to do is vote no, go home and tell everybody how bad the other party is.”
Kelly’s western Pennsylvania Republican colleague, Guy Reschenthaler, did not respond to emails. Kelly said his party was united around key ideas, like the need to reduce the budget deficit. But he didn’t offer specific ideas for how to keep his party together – and didn’t rule out the possibility that Republicans might again have to rely on Democrats to pass key spending bills.
“We have a very thin majority, as you know,” he said. “You can afford to lose one or two people, but at the end of the day, we have to have enough people to get it through.”
Rep. Summer Lee, who represents Pittsburgh and some of its suburbs, thinks conservative hardliners will make it difficult for the GOP to advance its biggest priorities.
“The Republicans are still going to be in disarray,” she said. She said the Freedom Caucus, who was a thorn in the side of former Speaker McCarthy, “is not more disciplined than they were last time. They are an undisciplined bunch.”
Whether Kelly and House Republicans can stay united will have big implications for the changes coming over the next two years – on everything from the size of the tax cuts coming, to what kind of immigration changes get enacted.
Republican trifecta
Kelly said Republicans are focused on the $36 trillion national debt — an amount of red ink he calls “totally incomprehensible.”
“There's no doubt in anybody's mind that if we do not get this negative spending out of the way, you can't keep building on this and expect good things to happen,” he said.
One of the GOP’s biggest decisions of the next two years, Kelly said, will be whether to try to pass most of their plans in one big bill or try to pass some of the ideas with broader support more quickly. Kelly said Republicans believe they can pass their major pieces of legislation by the end of April at the latest.
“We're trying to figure out what fits best with incoming President Trump, and what he wants to get done,” Kelly said.
Another related challenge, Kelly said, is going to be staying focused and on message with the mercurial Trump returning to the White House.
“From one news conference to the next, you look at different subjects that come up,” Kelly said. Trump’s utterances sometimes leave people wondering, “Are we going to change it to the Gulf of America? Or are we going to buy Greenland? Oh wait…are we going to merge with Canada?”
Early spending bills will send a more lasting signal to voters about how Republicans plan to run the country over the next two years. “That's our main objective. But all this other stuff gets interjected into it and it becomes confusing,” Kelly said. “So I think we have to keep our eye on the prize.”
Republicans are planning on using a process known as “reconciliation” that only requires budget bills to receive 51 votes in the Senate, rather than the 60 vote supermajority otherwise required. But the process can’t be used for issues unrelated to the budget – like a major piece of legislation on energy or immigration. Deluzio says that means Democrats will have some leverage.
Republicans “have to work with Democrats but they're going to own the government now,” Deluzio said. “They're going to own the consequences of their action or inaction, because they do have control.”
Deluzio is at least hopeful that Republicans will seek out areas of bipartisan consensus, including policies to support domestic manufacturing, trade policy and a rail safety bill he has been championing. He also hopes to work with the GOP on issues like bringing home local school teacher Marc Fogel, who has been detained in Russia since 2021.
Republicans may end up having to pass their spending bills along party lines. Deluzio doesn’t think many Democrats are going to support the kind of tax cuts that Republicans passed in 2017, and that are set to expire at the end of the year.
“These were fiscally reckless giveaways to billionaires, big corporations and all the rest, and it hurt our fiscal standing,” he said.
Deluzio is also skeptical of Republican plans to drastically cut government spending, an initiative being spearheaded by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.
“I am all about finding ways for our government to be efficient, to save public money, for government to work better,” he said. “What I am not supportive of is slashing Social Security or Medicare.”
During the 2024 campaign, Trump renounced plans to make such cuts, but Musk and Ramaswamy have talked about cutting the cost of government by $2 trillion a year – a level experts say is hard to imagine without reducing outlays to the popular entitlements.
Deluzio thinks denouncing corporate greed could be one of the Democrats’ best messages for the coming term. Reining in “greedflation” – price increases driven by profits – can be tied to bringing down costs, and large corporations can be used as a foil in supporting small businesses and standing up for workers.
“I think a lot of Democrats have an impulse to always be focused on some win-win framing. And that's fine sometimes,” he said. “But other times someone's in the wrong and you got to fight them on behalf of your people.”
‘Aside from resistance’
Deluzio also won’t compromise this term on issues relevant to protecting democracy, he said.
“What infuriates me is that I had colleagues who refused to do their duty four years ago,” he said, referring to the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol by supporters of Trump, who has continued to baselessly argue that he won the 2020 election.
Deluzio denounced fellow elected officials “who violated their oath of office, in my opinion, who egged on an insurrection to try to topple our government and rip up our Constitution.”
“I'm never going to forgive those people for their violation of their oath and their willingness to support a coup,” he said.
Lee said that the legacy of that event, and of Trump’s first term in office, made her pessimistic that Democrats could accomplish much alongside Republicans this term. But she said that she was excited about the opportunity for Democrats to reaffirm their connection to core constituencies – including some communities whose voters showed signs of moving right this past fall.
“This election is really the evidence that we have fallen off track, that there are people who we've missed, that we've allowed to fall into the gaps, and that fundamentally the Democratic Party is at a crossroads,” she said. “It can't be the millionaire class and also poor folks – it can't also be normal everyday working-class folks.”
To regain their trust, Lee said, Democrats are going to have to promise change as dramatic as Trump is promising – even as the party opposes Trump’s policies.
“People are so disillusioned, they are so disempowered, so disenfranchised, so discouraged with the system that any systems change was welcome for them,” she said.
Lee also thinks being in the minority this term will be an opportunity to expand the party’s base. “When you actually get to the root of it, rural working class folks and poor folks have the same concerns as urban ones,” Lee said. “But it's our job to bridge that divide.”
If Democrats are not successful, Lee worries the country will see continued backsliding on its core principles. She sees the rhetorical attacks from this past election on groups like immigrants as part of a fundamental shift away from the pluralistic values the country is based on.
“Words like fascism or oligarchy sometimes people think are hyperbole, but we are not above what's happened to other nations at different points of history,” she said. “And we find ourselves in some of the same places that others have when their nations went through some of their worst times.”
That’s why Lee sees one of her key responsibilities as being to defend the groups that often become the sacrificial lambs of far-right political movements.
“We should not accept compromise that harms the least of these, that continues and perpetuates harm amongst the most vulnerable,” she said. “Oftentimes in these fights, the people who are sacrificed are compromised by the same people over and over: women, in particular, particularly black and brown women, poor people, our seniors, our veterans.”
Lee emphasizes that “aside from resistance” Democrats have a unique challenge in that although they are in the minority, they have to actually govern and take action—and not just employ empty rhetoric.
“There's a problem if you leave the football game and it's raining outside and it's muddy and your jersey is still white,” she said. “We gotta start asking ourselves: Are we willing to get dirty in the game? And if we are not, why are we on the bench, why are we on the team?”
One area Lee hopes she and some Republicans can find common ground on: women’s health. “Especially from a caucus that puts a huge emphasis on giving birth, I'd like them to really work with us to ensure that when black women give birth, that they survive,” she said.
Kelly also hopes to focus on the health of disadvantaged residents. He’s backed an effort to make weight loss medications, like Ozempic, affordable for low-income and elderly residents through the government’s Medicare Part D program. Kelly says it’s much harder to convince people in their later years to exercise and eat more healthily than it is when they are young.
“They can't afford a lot of these different opportunities to get their weight down to where it should be,” he said. “All we're talking about is taking the most vulnerable and making it more available to them than they wouldn't normally have, so that they can enjoy the best life that they have left.”
