Culture War Roundup for the Week of December 07, 2020

A Democratic Representative (Bill Pascrell) has written to ask that 126 members of the House not be seated, as promoting insurrection or rebellion (14th Amendment, section 3). Currently, the house leans 222-211, with 2 seats too close to call. Assuming that the remaining seats go Republican, this would be 222-213. If the Republicans move to exclude anyone who approves of Rep. Pascrell's motion, as itself being a promotion of insurrection, and at least 9 Democratic Reps have approved of Pascrell's motion, it's conceivable that we end up with dueling Houses.

Normally, this isn't an issue, as each house of Congress is in control of their membership, and there hasn't been a member refused a seat since Powell v. McCormack, which said that no one can use qualifications not listed in the Constitution. However, this doesn't seem like normal times.

There's many different outcomes that I can see. There's the obvious: Democrats win and disenfranchise ¼ of the population. There's the less obvious: Republican-controlled Senate only entertains bills coming from the Republican House. Then we get to the inevitable result of a lawsuit going up to SCOTUS. Most likely resulting in them declaring no one was actually in insurrection or rebellion, so no one could have been denied a seat. However, this is probably more than a year of dueling Houses, and the consequent problem of: who's bills actually passed, which possibly boils down to which House actually managed to gain a majority of the members, assuming one does not.

Fortunately, we don't need to worry about whether any individual bill get a majority of the vote, so long as a majority of the House is there to constitute quorum. A bill is passed if the House says it passed. The unfortunate consequence is if both of them manage to get a quorum (due to members attending both), and the bills that pass are disjoint.

This all gets even more exciting if members of one or both houses actually do join an insurrection.

The result I hope for is Speaker Pelosi ignores the stupid proposal from the Rep. from New Jersey, and everyone gets seated. Luckily, I think this is also the most likely result.

/r/TheMotte Thread