This is an adapted excerpt from the Jan. 5 episode of “Inside with Jen Psaki.”
On Friday, Mike Johnson was re-elected speaker of the House — but not without a healthy dose of drama. Initially, Johnson didn’t have the votes and, for a moment, it looked like we were headed for another Kevin McCarthyesque multiday dumpster fire. However, in the end, two of the key Republican holdouts decided to vote for Johnson — right after getting phone calls from President-elect Donald Trump.
Moving forward, one of the things I am most interested in is how Democrats are going to take advantage of all this chaos.
See, the House speaker vote is supposed to be pretty boring and predictable but, just like McCarthy’s five-day, 15-ballot fiasco in 2023, it wasn’t. As The Washington Post reported, a total of nine House Republicans used the vote on Friday to show displeasure with Johnson in one way or another. That number is significant because that’s how many it takes to trigger a vote to remove Johnson in this new Congress.
Rep. Chip Roy was one of those nine. Even after voting for Johnson in the end, Roy issued the speaker somewhat of a threat: “It was very important for a group of us to make clear we’re going to expect the agenda the president ran on to get delivered,” Roy said on Fox News. “That is why there were nine people who withheld their votes. It sends a message that we are going to be watching them.”
Friday’s events are just another sign of how chaotic this Congress is going to be. I mean, Johnson just barely eked out a victory and now he’s going to be in charge of the slimmest House majority in modern history. That’s not to mention the Trump of it all — or the Elon Musk of it all — posting and tanking bills and pulling strings.
It’s going to be messy, that much is clear. So moving forward, one of the things I am most interested in is how Democrats are going to take advantage of all this chaos. Again, the GOP’s majority is razor-thin and Republicans in Congress will also be beholden to the whims of Trump and Musk.
Now, that’s a scary place for the country to be but it’s also a place full of political opportunity for the Democratic Party. To that point, longtime, legendary Democratic strategist James Carville is out with a new op-ed in The New York Times all about what went wrong in the 2024 election and where Democrats should go from here.
In his piece, Carville does something most strategists don’t: He admits he was wrong. His advice mainly focuses on the top of the ticket, but I think there are plenty of lessons in here for Democrats in Congress too.
Now, as for what went wrong in November, Carville returns to a familiar refrain, writing, “We lost for one very simple reason: It was, it is and it always will be the economy, stupid.” As for where the party should go from here, Carville lays out a strategy in a few parts. The first is advice on how Democrats should form their opposition, Carville writes, “We have got to stop making Trump himself our main focus.”
“Our messaging machine must sharply focus on opposing the unpopular Republican economic agenda that will live on past him,” he continues. “Vocally oppose the party, not the person or the extremism of his movement.”
House Republicans have certainly given Democrats some fodder for that. Here are some of the top issues on their agenda for this Congress: Extend the 2017 Trump tax law, which largely favors the wealthiest Americans and big corporations, repeal clean energy funding and provide more resources to carry out mass deportations. So, don’t oppose those policies only because Trump supports them, oppose them because they’re bad policies for the country and for you. The second part of the strategy Carville lays out is to go on offense, writing: We must be on the offensive with a wildly popular and populist economic agenda they cannot be for. Let’s start by forcing them to oppose a raise in the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Let’s make Roe v. Wade an economic messaging issue and force them to block our attempts to codify it into law. And let’s take back the immigration issue by making it an economic issue and force the G.O.P. to deny bipartisan reform that expedites entry for high-performing talent and for those who will bring business into our nation.
That all sounds pretty smart to me. Look, Friday’s speaker vote was another reminder that Republicans control nearly everything in Washington, but it was also a reminder that this is not going to be smooth sailing for them. It’s going to be messy. That is why it may be the perfect time for Democrats to get out there with an aggressive strategy and show the American people why they can and should be put into power again. Allison Detzel contributed.
Jen Psaki is the host of "The Briefing with Jen Psaki" airing Tuesdays through Fridays at 9 p.m. EST. She is the former White House press secretary for President Joe Biden.
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