Since Tuesday night: Democrats took the House with about 225 seats and the Senate with 54, flipping seven Republican seats, with Alaska and Mississippi still counting. The Speaker gave up his leadership post without a statement. The vice president blamed the war and the president said he’d fight it again. Susie Wiles is out and Stephen Miller is White House chief of staff, a promotion one House Republican described to Fox as the work of a “megalomaniac” who “should have never been given the keys to the Ferrari.” The president offered the press secretary job to Dana White of the UFC by Truth Social post, ending “Dana, please take the job!”, which readers noticed is how you address someone you haven’t asked. And on Sunday morning the attorney general went on CNN and told the incoming Oversight chairman, who had said Miller should “lawyer up,” that “the Constitution sees it as my job,” that “I would be very worried if I was a member on that committee,” and, asked whether there was a crime in Democrats’ oversight threats, “It depends on what’s said. So yes, there could be.”
That is the landscape. Here is the calendar it lands on.
Monday. Dana White is due at the White House to discuss the press secretary offer; CNN reported Saturday that he intends to decline. The job has been vacant since Katie Zacharia was removed on October 16 after five days. Watch whether the president, having announced the offer publicly, accepts a public no. Congress returns for the lame duck and freshman orientation begins, which means the new Democratic senators and representatives who will run the committees are in the building for the first time while the committees are still Republican.
Tuesday. Alaska posts its next count. Peltola leads Sullivan by 637 first-choice votes with a quarter of ballots outstanding, a second count follows Friday, ranked-choice tabulation is November 18 and certification November 25. The president’s demand that the “Fake Dan Sullivan” votes be “immediately given to the REAL Dan Sullivan” has no mechanism in Alaska law, as this publication explained Friday, and the Justice Department’s own suit was dismissed on November 1 because it offered “no workable plan.” Mississippi is tighter: Scott Colom led Cindy Hyde-Smith by 1,138 votes Thursday with some 45,000 ballots estimated outstanding and no recount procedure in state law, so that one goes to court by the week’s end. Both seats are currently Republican. The Senate is 54 without them.
Midweek: the House Republican leadership vote. Steve Scalise against Jim Jordan for minority leader, with Johnson not running. This is the first test of the October 6 prediction that the smaller conference would pick a leader who sounds like the president. Jordan is that; Scalise is the version who can count votes. Whoever wins inherits a conference that just told reporters, anonymously and in numbers, that Miller cost them seats, and that now answers to Miller.
Any day: the Hegseth resolution. Thomas Massie, who leaves Congress in January, has promised to force a privileged vote on his articles of impeachment against the defense secretary, which under House rules must be taken up within two legislative days of being noticed. The Republican majority can table it, and will, but every member goes on record about Hegseth in the week after CBS reported the president asking advisers whether to replace him. Massie has said the only way to avoid the vote is for Hegseth to resign or be fired. The DeSantis option, a lame-duck confirmation before his term as governor ends January 5, stays open until the new Senate is sworn in and closes the moment it is.
All week: Blanche and the committee. Robert Garcia, who takes the Oversight gavel in January, answered Blanche on the same CNN program: “What Todd Blanche is doing right now is a threat,” and “we’re not going to be intimidated.” Expect the committee’s incoming staff to publish its first document request list this week, with Miller, Wiles’s conduct at HHS, the Iran war and the Epstein files on it. Expect Blanche’s department to answer with the thing he previewed. Whether that answer takes the form of a preliminary review of sitting members of Congress for statements made on television is the question that will define the next two years, and it may be asked this week. That last sentence is my inference.
The war. The president has said since the United Nations in September that the Iran decision comes after the election. The election is over. Iran’s parliament speaker posted that “Americans said NO TO WAR, and we endorse this message,” which is Tehran bidding for the deal. The president said Wednesday he’d “have to do it again.” A decision either way in the next week is likelier than not, and it will be the first thing the new Congress inherits.
And the world. Germany’s defense minister called the result a “historic victory”; Spain’s prime minister said Americans “voted against policies that only impoverish”; Norway’s called it a “powerful political signal.” Moscow’s response ran in two registers: the deputy foreign minister dismissed Democrats’ Russia views as “extremely negative,” and the state daily warned Europe to brace for “Trump’s wrath” now that the midterms are lost, which is a Kremlin prediction worth holding against the week’s tariff and NATO news. In Israel, where Netanyahu lost his own majority on October 27, Yair Lapid said the American result “eliminates any possibility of a unity government led by Netanyahu,” and Herzog’s choice of who forms the next government is still pending. One analyst’s line has the week right: Netanyahu lost two elections in seven days.
The lame duck lasts 56 days. Everything above happens inside the first five of them.
Himiller might want to find a better lawyer…🤣🤭