On the day before the big day and their swearing in, Congress members-elect Nellie Pou and Herb Conaway were like freshmen at the beginning of college, leaving home behind and moving into new quarters.
“Well, I’m now in Washington at this very moment,” said Pou on Thursday. “I was moving into my new apartment that I needed to have, obviously, so just trying to get settled and getting everything in place for tomorrow.”
Pou and Conaway said goodbye to their respective seats in the state Legislature last week, a place of mostly collegiality and Democratic Party control. As now first-year members of the minority party in Congress, Conaway and Pou won’t have much say on anything, although a very slim GOP majority in the House could make their votes at times critical.
“They’re going to be left in the position of the loyal opposition, pointing out where the majority party is making its mistakes,” said Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics. “But the margins are really, really close, and so every vote matters. You’ve got vacancies with members leaving to be in Trump’s cabinet, so there are vacancies that have to be filled, and this make the margin really, really small.”
