Idea: Democrats lose House in 2010-Regain Majority in 2012

Perhaps this would be better placed in chat-but for now I'm posting this here. As a hypothetical what would the period between 2013 and 2015 have looked like with a narrow Democratic Majority. Admittedly-seeing the Democratic Party regain the House Majority in 2012 without altering anything else is hard to envision-but suppose that Democratic candidates had done better during both the 2010 and 2012 cycles. 2010 is still a Republican landslide-but a few more Democrats are narrowly reelected. In 2012 the Democrats pick up more seats compared to what happened historically-enough that when those seats are added to the seats they historically won and the seats they didn't lose in 2010 here-they have an extremely narrow majority in 2013 but a majority nonetheless. Plausibility issues aside-how would the return of Speaker Pelosi have impacted that period? How would the House Democrats have dealt with sequestration/the fiscal cliff with a majority?


The shutdown doesn't happen-because there's no way that Senator Cruz can make that happen without a large proportion of the House majority on his side. The debt ceiling is uneventfully raised. I do wonder if the Democrats would have learned the lesson of 2011 and figured out a way to remove the possibility of a repeat performance of that crisis should the Republicans take back control in 2014-which they inevitably will. I'm not sure how they might be able to achieve that outcome. Reinstating the Gephardt rule would mean having to pass a budget-which is difficult to say the least even with a narrow Democratic majority. Perhaps some form of the Gephardt rule that also applies to continuing resolutions and other forms of increased expenditures?

Immigration Reform would probably have passed. While the lack of a supermajority in the Senate would have kept the Obama administration from a repeat performance of 2009-2010 there were enough votes in the Senate to pass Immigration Reform. The House Republicans killed that effort.

No Gun Control legislation would have passed because of the Senate.

Admittedly-this is not a likely circumstance. But had the Democrats been lucky enough in 2010 and 212 for this scenario to happen-what policies would they have pursued in 2013-2014? How would the Obama administration react to once again having a Democratic Majority in both chambers-albeit not the massive one from Obama's first two years in office?

What of the Republicans here? Would Boehner remain as Minority leader or would have been pushed out in favor of Eric Cantor? If Cantor is Minority Leader and prospective Speaker of the House-would he have managed to hold on to his seat? If Boehner keeps his position as Minority Leader-and has a two year hiatus from having to push his conference to do things that a large proportion of them don't want to do would he still have resigned when he did? That is-when the Republicans inevitably retake the Majority in 2014 would Boehner stick around thereafter if he isn't dropped by his conference in 2013?

In short what policies would have passed through Congress had the Democratic Party had an extremely narrow-but genuine-House Majority in 2013?
 
Top