Who Will Fill George Santos’s Expensive Shoes Tonight?

Plus: Ukraine aid passed the Senate. There’s still a long road ahead.

(Bulwark photo alteration / Photo by Jacquelyn Martin-Pool/Getty Images)

Today is the special election to fill the vacancy left by George Santos, erstwhile representative of New York’s 3rd Congressional District, following his expulsion from the House last December. The race is between Democrat Tom Suozzi and Republican Mazi Melesa Pilip. The stakes are as high as they get these days—but it might not be for the reasons you think.

When polls close tonight, commentators are going to overinterpret the results. Those aligned with the winner will claim momentum for the presidential election, while the losing side will either panic outright or cast blame on some outside factor such as the president, the former president, the House leadership, or even George Santos himself.

The main problem with these sorts of snap takes is that they look too far ahead, glancing over more salient and obvious short-term consequences. The most important thing to keep in mind about the result of tonight’s election is what it will mean for the math of the current House, which in turn will tell us a lot about what Republicans will be able to accomplish or obstruct in the coming weeks and months.

Right now, the House’s power ratio is 219 Republicans to 212 Democrats; there are also four vacancies. If Suozzi wins the seat and adds another Democrat to the tally, then on days when everyone is in attendance, Speaker Mike Johnson would have only three votes to lose before he comes up short. As we’ve seen, a margin this thin creates big risks for anything brought to the floor, but especially the very partisan items.

After failing to advance articles of impeachment for Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas last week, House Republicans are going to try to get a mulligan by flying in House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, who is currently undergoing cancer treatment, to pick up his additional ballot this evening. The timeline is tight: If this vote were to happen tomorrow night instead, they might have to adjust their math to account for a newly sworn-in Suozzi. If Pilip wins, of course, Republicans will have an extra inch to pivot a hyperpartisan couch up the legislative stairs—things like a vote to impeach Biden, or the various censure resolutions that pop up every couple of weeks.

I don’t want to write off ‘bellwether’ talk entirely: The special election could give a sense for how some swing voters are responding to the constant state of chaos and general incompetence of the House. Suozzi represented the district for three terms before making an unsuccessful run for governor last cycle (which gave Santos his opening to slide into the seat), and he held other offices in the local area such as county executive and the mayorship of Glen Cove. During the short campaign for this race, Suozzi has been accessible, and at times he’s been critical of his party’s leadership. This is normal, capable politicking—the sort of thing that would probably appeal to someone disgusted by the House’s endless dysfunction.

Pilip, on the other hand, is a mysterious newcomer and committed Republican partisan. While largely avoiding the press and ducking debate invitations, she has parroted standard GOP talking points. About Trump, she said, “I think, you know, mentally, he’s stable.” (She meant this as an endorsement.)

Mara Gay at the New York Times summed up the race in a Tuesday morning editorial, writing:

Strong turnout among civically minded voters in Nassau County (and a corner of Queens) may be the difference between sending a responsible public servant to Congress and sending another partisan provocateur instead.

Last-minute polling from Siena College shows Suozzi leading by four points, which is within the poll’s margin of error. While the circumstances and issues suggest a Democratic win, New York was by far the most valuable region for Republican pickups in 2022. Anything can happen. That’s NumberWang.

Dishonorable discharge 

Readers who caught Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger’s Morning Shots today will know the Senate handily passed its supplemental foreign aid package to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan very early this morning in spite of some eleventh-hour shenanigans from the usual suspects, Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), and J.D. Vance (R-Ohio). The bill’s fate now rests with the lower chamber.

To understand what routes are available to passing the legislation in the House, allow me to explain.

The only least likely way out is through

The first possibility is straight-up passage in the House. Because of the House Republican leadership’s unflinching loyalty to Donald Trump, this is probably not the way the aid package reaches the president’s desk for signature.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has vowed not to bring it to the floor (because of the border, naturally). But even if he did bring it to a vote, it’s unlikely Ukraine aid would muster enough Republican support to meet the threshold of the Hastert Rule (the longtime House GOP practice of requiring legislation have the support of “a majority of the majority,” named for former speaker and pedophile Dennis Hastert).

Republicans refused to entertain the border security and immigration reform bill that a bipartisan group of senators negotiated in exchange for the foreign aid supplemental. Because it died as soon as it was released, senators moved on with the aid package as a standalone. It sailed through the Senate with bipartisan support, and now House Republicans are lamenting that it doesn’t include a border component. This is less a reminder than an emblem of the House GOP’s bad-faith approach to this issue, and it likely means the regular legislative path for this important bill has been foreclosed.

When God closes a door…

The other way forward would be via a discharge petition, which allows an aggrieved coalition (made up of the minority party and members of the majority who are at odds with their leadership) to force a vote on legislation. While it sounds relatively straightforward, a discharge petition is an incredibly complex proposition, and its success would depend on many factors beyond the rare moment of bipartisan collaboration.

To bring a bill to the floor using a discharge petition, the bill needs to have been referred to a standing committee for at least 30 legislative days. That modifier is important because of the randomness it introduces to the timeline: There might be three legislative days in a week and there could be two weeks without any. Like timeouts and deliberate fouls during the final seconds of an NBA game, this quirk of the legislative calendar can make a short period exceptionally long. And that’s without taking into account when the bill was referred to the relevant committee in the first place. 

A discharge petition also requires signatures from a majority of the chamber before it can be used to advance a bill to a vote. After the NY03 special election tonight, the magic number will be 217. Things aren’t simple here, either: There’s no guarantee that all Democrats will sign a petition. Because of the Israel component of the supplemental, many on the left wing of the Democratic caucus will likely be hesitant to back it because they believe it supports an ongoing genocide against Palestinians. This is why the bill lost several Democrats in this morning’s Senate vote.

Discharge petitions are frequently proposed but rarely ever get enough signatures to advance. Very few make it to an actual vote on the House floor.

Even so, this foreign aid package enjoys an unusual amount of bipartisan support that other legislation has lacked, which could make a discharge petition viable after all. Consider the bill’s resounding win in a split Senate. While Speaker Johnson is claiming he will not bring the aid package to the floor, discharge petitions can serve as a pressure mechanism for overcoming this sort of opposition.¹

Democrats say they are open to a discharge petition. “House Democrats are prepared to use every available legislative tool to make sure we get comprehensive national security legislation over the finish line,” Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said last week.

And they might receive a helping hand from sympathetic Republicans in the Senate. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) has said discussions have been ongoing with House leaders to make a discharge petition happen.

There’s an incorrigible part of the GOP base that doesn’t want any kind of aid going to Ukraine in their war against the Russian invasion. Whether this can be chalked up to years-long political grievances or some sense of faux isolationism², it probably depends on which lawmaker you ask.

1. For this kind of pressure to work, the speaker needs to be capable of shame. As we’ve seen during the 118th Congress, although the majority party has repeatedly forced embarrassments on itself, this political masochism has not resulted in any progress or change in behavior.

2. Isolationism is often used to describe modern Republicans’ opposition to supporting European allies. It’s not the best term for a party that simultaneously muses about carpet-bombing and sending troops into Mexico, unless you mean something like “moral isolationism.”