My first piece on Saturday exploring the key votes identified by our Chris earlier in the year suggested that the numbers might be worth mining.

Further work has indeed brought up one or two things of interest.

The purpose, be it said, of these inquiries is not mere academic interest: if, as we all expect, the Dems take control of the 110th House, a key factor in their success - and their chances of extending their franchise - will be how much solidarity the Dem leadership can command on key votes.

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Given the imminence of the expected Dem win in the House, I thought I'd take another look at the way in which the various groups of Dem reps cast their votes in the key votes which Chris identified back in April in his 'Building a Real House Majority' piece - which formed the basis of my first look at the way minorities in the Dem House party regularly sided with the GOP on key votes, sometimes to the extent of being the difference between bills passing or not.

In the light of recent controversy over the way a Dem-controlled 110th, I thought I'd see what clues the performance of the Dems in the 109th might provide.

So I've been doing a fair bit of spreadsheeting - which, unfortunately, I have no place to put online right now!

Spreadsheets need to be shuffled and cut a fair bit to yield their goodness; but first indications are interesting.

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Suppose the Dems perform to Chris's expectations in the House: how do the GOP fight back?

At this stage, I'm not looking at the minutiae of House rules, but thinking aloud about possible general approaches.

At one end of the spectrum, they could try all-out obstructionism.

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Over the weekend, I've been mulling the roll call votes from the 109th House that Chris identified as the

twenty-eight votes on actual pieces of legislation where the majority position among Democrats in the House was different from the majority position among Republicans in the House.

(There's a slight hitch to be got over: there are 30 actual RCVs in the list (his #7 is not one, his #11 has four), of which all but one (his #8) involve a majority of Dems voting against, a majority of GOP for. It makes the spreadsheet a pain to leave #8 in, so I've ignored it - leaving 29 votes left to consider.)

Chris's idea in selecting these RCVs was, he said,

those twenty-eight votes provide the answer to the age-old question: how are Republicans different from Democrats?

Some of us doubted at the time whether the test chosen was capable of answering the question posed. But they're certainly important RCVs when considering the cohesion and coherence of the Dem party in the House.

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By the most often used measure of control, Democrats currently need to take fifteen seats in the House of Representative in order to gain a majority. Fifteen more seats would give Democrats control over House leadership positions, House committees and subcommittee chairs, and also subpoena power. However, as Democrats like Joe Lieberman and Bruce Reed are able to consistently remind us, that is not the only type of control over the House of Representatives. Not only would Bush remaining President make it difficult, if not impossible, for a Democratic House to pass any meaningful, progressive legislation into law, there are many Democrats who would make that task quite difficult.

There is another type of control Democrats should be shooting for in November and beyond: a voting majority for the majority Democratic position on important pieces of legislation. After all, our long term goal is not only for the Democratic Party to be in control, but for the ideas and issues for which the majority of the Democratic Party stands to be in control. Before we figure out how to make that happen, we first need to figure out what than would even mean. If I may be so bold, I have the answer in the extended entry.

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