By Dr. Rod Berger
New here? I'm Dr. Rod Berger, the newest voice on The Dangerous Ones Network. For most of my working life, my job has been to hand someone else the microphone: more than 4,000 interviews across five continents. On Help Me Understand, you bring the question to The People's Hotline, and I go find where we've seen it before.
The day after the election, a listener called The People's Hotline. She was glad about the results. She was also afraid of the wait.
“I'm not gonna celebrate right now, because I am so happy that everything turned blue, but… I'm just scared to death that when these people get sworn in in January, he's gonna try to do something stupid, and it just makes me very nervous.”
A caller to The People's Hotline, troubled, on the wait until January
What she fears is hers, and I'm leaving it with her. Nobody knows what anyone will do in these weeks. She's waiting for the swearing-in. She did her part on November 3, and her answer doesn't take effect until January.
Sixty-one days
From election night to January 3 is sixty-one days. For those weeks, the outgoing Congress, including the members voters just removed, still holds every vote it held on November 2.
On November 5, ABC News Live laid out what's left. Congress has to fund the government before the stopgap runs out on December 11, and it has to pass the annual defense bill. NBC News Now reported that Senate Republicans want to confirm about two dozen judicial nominees before the majority changes hands, and the Judiciary Committee has already set hearings. And NewsNation reported that Thomas Massie of Kentucky, a Republican who isn't returning to Congress, has promised to force a House vote on impeaching Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The President called Massie a loser and said he intends to keep Hegseth, ABC reported.
The strongest case for all of it is correct. The Constitution gives these members their full term, and their voters sent them for the whole term. A term is a term.
But the vote that keeps a member honest is the next one. For some of these members, there isn't a next one. That cuts both ways. A member with no next election is free of the voters. He's also free of the party.
The winter the lame ducks died
The gap used to be much longer. Before 1933, a Congress elected in November didn't take office until March, and it usually didn't meet until the December after that, thirteen months after the vote. Members who had just lost kept legislating all winter. People called them lame ducks.
On January 24, 1933, the Chattanooga Daily Times put it across the front page: “Lame Ducks Die With 36 States Asking Change.” The states had just ratified the Twentieth Amendment, which moved the new Congress to January 3 and the inauguration to January 20.
It arrived in the middle of the hardest of those winters. Herbert Hoover had lost in November 1932, and Franklin Roosevelt wouldn't take office until March 4. In between, banks failed across the country, and the man leaving and the man arriving couldn't agree on what to do about it.
The amendment shrank the gap. It didn't close it.
Forty-four days in 1860
Voters elected Abraham Lincoln on November 6, 1860. South Carolina left the Union on December 20, forty-four days later. The next morning, the Daily Nashville Patriot printed a telegraph from Mobile: “There is immense joy at the Secession of South Carolina.” Six more states left before Lincoln took the oath. In February, Tennessee voters refused even to call a convention to consider it.
In 1998, forty-six days after a midterm, the outgoing House impeached a president. The Leaf-Chronicle in Clarksville used two words: “Clinton impeached.”
The weeks are short. They've never been empty.
What our line was already hearing
Our line was nervous long before this election. Of the 1,627 calls to The People's Hotline we could read this summer, nearly half came in troubled or critical, about 29 percent troubled and 20 percent critical. That count stops in early September, before anyone voted, and a filter blocks about a quarter of all calls before anyone reads them. The election didn't settle the nerves. It gave them a calendar.
The frame I have to watch
It's easy for me to call these weeks dangerous when the people holding them aren't the people I'd have chosen. If the parties traded places, I'd want to call the same weeks getting work done. Democrats confirmed a run of judges in December 2014 after they lost the Senate. Republicans confirmed judges after the 2020 election. The move isn't new, and it isn't one side's.
And most of us treat election night as the finish line. We vote, we watch the returns, and we stop paying attention. These weeks belong to whoever is still watching. Right now, that's mostly the people inside the building.
What do you expect to happen before January 3, and where did that expectation come from?
If someone you voted out still gets to vote for eight more weeks, what do they owe you?
If your side were the one leaving, which of these moves would you defend?
The last time you were on your way out of something, a job, a role, a house, how did you act?
When nobody can hold you to account anymore, who are you? Tell me in the comments.
A note on limits: Our hotline numbers stop in early September and describe the people who called, not the country. History doesn't predict any one December. And one caller's fear is one caller's fear.
Meet your host
I’ve written for Forbes and Entrepreneur, and I serve as Editor-at-Large at Fair Observer. For nearly two decades, I was a guest lecturer on Storytelling in Business at Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management. You’ll find more of my work at drrodberger.com.
Here, my job is narrower. The callers can take a side. I don't. I go looking for where we've seen this before, and I bring back the strongest case each side can make.
Help Me Understand, the podcast
Help Me Understand is my podcast on The Dangerous Ones Network. Each episode takes the stories from the news that make no sense to an ordinary person and asks the question we should be asking and aren't.
Latest episode: The Weeks In Between. The lame duck, the judges, Thomas Massie's vote and the winters when these weeks mattered most.
Recent episodes: The Three-Point Plan and Persuasion Over Division with Marshall Herskovitz, Calling the Bluff, Lives of Quiet Struggle with Marshall Herskovitz, and Ninety Dollars and a Door.
The book
Most of us live inside stories we never chose. Someone handed them to us, and we kept telling them.
The Narrative Edge: Authentic Storytelling That Meets the Moment (Wiley) is my book about learning to see those stories: how a story gets built, whose interests it serves, and what it asks you to do. Help Me Understand brings the same habit to the news.
Watch or listen: The Weeks In Between
Watch the full episode on Substack
Help Me Understand with Dr. Rod Berger, on The Dangerous Ones Network. Have something you're trying to understand? Call The People's Hotline and leave a message: 503-212-4600.