Sen. Ben Ray Lujan, a New Mexico Democrat, suffered a stroke last week. He’s expected to make a full recovery and to return to Washington in a few weeks. Until then, the Democrats won’t be at full strength, which is causing a fair amount of panic among some observers. After all, the party balance in the Senate is dead even, a 50-50 tie, with Democrats only holding their slim majority thanks to Vice President Kamala Harris’s tie-breaking vote.
But this kind of situation does not call for freaking out. In fact, assuming the timeline is correct and that no other disruptions happen, it’s really not that big a deal for the Democrats’ floor majority.
The math is simple. So far this year, Harris has only broken ties 15 times, and four of those were nominations that required two votes. That’s a lot, historically speaking; the last vice president to have voted more times was Schuyler Colfax, and he had four years to do it (1869-1873). But even if there were another handful of cases where Republicans might’ve forced a tie with full attendance, it’s not really that many compared to all the measures that Democrats have brought to the Senate floor. They’ve already taken 32 votes this year, after taking 528 last year. Some of those were due to the filibuster — on normal legislation, it takes 60 votes, rather than a simple majority, to defeat a filibuster, and Senate practice since 2009 has been to filibuster everything that can be filibustered. Missing Lujan is unlikely to matter much in those situations, although it’s possible that some bill will arise that can get exactly 10 Republicans along with all the Democrats and will therefore have to be postponed until he’s back.
