Who Will Obama Be Bargaining With In The 113 House?

By Matthew Yglesias | Posted Friday, Nov. 16, 2012, at 9:51 AM ET

An underrated issue looking at the legislative agenda in the new year is the question of who's actually decisive in the House of Representatives.

This is perhaps best explained by analogy with the United States Senate. Over there it's clear that what you need is a coalition of 60 Senators to pass bills under the normal process. That means the 55 Democrats plus 5 moderate Republicans, or else the 45 Republicans plus 15 moderate Democrats. Sometimes big leader-to-leader agreements happen, but legislation often occurs on the basis of minimum winning coalitions. The Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill, for example, was overwhelmingly opposed by the GOP but Scott Brown, Susan Collins, and Olympia Snowe made a separate peace with the Democrats and it passed.