House Republicans are ready to do battle on the opening day of the new Congress, and beyond, if the certified winner in an Iowa House race by six votes isn’t seated.
Iowa’s state canvass board early last week certified results for Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District after a district-wide count in all 24 counties declared Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks the winner of the election by just six votes out of more than 394,000 cast. But Democrat Rita Hart announced later in the week she planned to file a petition in coming weeks with the House Committee on Administration under the Federal Contested Elections Act.
The House, under the Constitution, has the final say over who it seats as members.
Yet, Congress rarely gets involved in deciding closely called contested House races. And precedent from trying to do so still leaves political scars among many.
In November 1984, an Indiana congressional election ended in a narrow win for the Republican nominee, Rick McIntyre, who was trying to unseat Democratic Rep. Frank McCloskey after a single term. The battle for the 8th Congressional District was decided four months later by a House Committee Administration panel led by then-Rep. Leon Panetta, a California Democrat.
McCloskey led McIntyre by 72 votes on election night. But following two state recounts, McIntyre led McCloskey by margins of 34 and 418 votes.
“They sent a group of congressmen led by Leon Panetta into Indiana to try to get an accurate vote count before we seated anyone, and it was a long, involved process,” recalled Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, who was a second-term House member at the time of the 1985 dispute.
After the Democratic-controlled House-sponsored recount, the committee headed by Panetta voted to accept McCloskey as the winner, by four votes out of the 230,000 ballots cast in the 1984 November election cycle.
The committee, with two Democrats and one Republican, voted along party lines all the way through its proceedings. House Republicans, by then in the minority for 30 years, were enraged at what they called outright theft of a House seat.
“They even had [McIntyre] come on to the floor… and act like a congressman,” Durbin told the Washington Examiner. “They were determined to present the case that he had won. And then, in the end, it was judged that he did not win.”
Republicans charged that the panel of two Democrats and one Republican, which directed the recount, followed rigged rules during the counting. Republican House members, angered by the process, accused Democrats of stealing the seat and staged a walk off the House floor during the debate.
“It was rough. The Republicans were convinced we stole the election,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, a Maryland Democrat, told the Washington Examiner.
Regarding the contested Iowa race, “It needs to be fair and transparent,” said Hoyer, who was in his fourth year in the House during the 1985 Indiana House seat fracas.
Durbin also recalls the uncertainty at the time. When asked if he thought it was an appropriate way to settle a congressional race, he replied, “I don’t know. At this point, they reached a point where they didn’t have a conclusive winner in the eyes of the Democrats.”
Taking up the same role Panetta had 35 years ago, Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat who is the vice chairman on the House Administration Committee, will now lead the panel that will review Hart’s petition and decide how to move forward with it. However, Republicans winced at the idea that Raskin would be fair.
“We will never allow that to happen here. That was illegal. There was a power grab. And we will never allow that to happen. I don’t care what Jamie Raskin says,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy told the Washington Examiner.
“If the certificate goes to the state, that is the individual who’s going to be seated, and they don’t have the right to try to pick and choose just because they lost so badly in the elections, that they’re trying to steal a seat,” McCarthy said. “We will not allow it.”
“Democrats are trying to repeat the same sham maneuver they conducted after the 1984 election,” McCarthy’s office wrote in a recent blog post. “Rep. Raskin is the liberal Democrat who, two days before President Trump was even sworn into office, told a crowd about his plans to impeach the incoming President. Not exactly the voice of impartial justice.”
National Republican Congressional Committee Deputy Communications Director Bob Salera called Raskin a “left-wing partisan hack,” adding in a press statement, “Raskin is being chosen to subvert the will of Iowans for one reason — he is one of Nancy Pelosi’s most loyal foot soldiers in Congress and he will do whatever it takes to add another member to her socialist caucus.”
However, Hoyer defended Raskin, his Maryland colleague and a former law professor at American University.
“I think the House administration will look at it honestly and fairly,” Hoyer said. “Jamie is a very fair, honest person, and we ought to find out who won.”
