House Speaker John Boehner has grown increasingly belligerent in his "fiscal cliff" fight with the Obama administration. Struggling to hold together a caucus that never really respected his "leadership," Boehner is trying to rally his troops by ripping President Obama's supposed disregard for Republican control of the House of Representatives.

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House Speaker John Boehner has grown increasingly belligerent in his "fiscal cliff" fight with the Obama administration. Struggling to hold together a caucus that never really respected his "leadership," Boehner is trying to rally his troops by ripping President Obama's supposed disregard for Republican control of the House of Representatives.

Arguing that the Obama White House must meet his demands for deep cuts in programs that benefit the elderly and the disabled, Boehner griped on Fox News this week that "they must have forgotten Republicans continue to hold a majority in the House."

It is unlikely that the president and his aides have forgotten that Boehner and his crew continue to control one chamber of the Congress. But they also recognize that President Obama won a clear mandate -- a 332-206 advantage in the Electoral College, a 4.7 million popular vote margin for a 51-47 percent victory -- on November 6.

In July, Boehner said the November 6 election would be a "referendum on the president's economic policies." On November 6, Obama won that referendum.

The president was not the only winner.

Beyond Obama's personal mandate, Democrats can point to a clear signal from the voting for the US Senate. The Democratic caucus added two new members -- despite the fact that the pattern of contests was overwhelmingly favorable to the Republicans -- for a clear 55-45 advantage in the chamber.

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Notably, the Democratic mandate extends to the House.

How's that? Doesn't John Boehner have a mandate of his own?

Not if we're counting actual votes.

In the 2012 voting for US House seats that formally finished Saturday with a runoff in Louisiana, 59,262,059 Americans voted Democratic, while only 58,105,500 voted Republican.

It is true, of course, that Boehner and his caucus control the majority of seats. While their numbers are diminished from where they were in 2010, the Republicans still maintain a 234-201 advantage in the chamber. But that advantage in not based on the popular will; it is based on the manipulated maps created by the redrawing of congressional districts following the 2010 Census, and on the fact that Democratic votes are concentrated in urban and college-town districts, as well as those with substantial minority populations.

While the maps didn't favor the Democrats on November 6, the voters did. Indeed the national popular-vote margin for the Democrats in the race for the House was substantial: a 1,156,550 advantage.

It has been 70 years since the party that controlled the Congress did not win the most votes.

Usually, the party that wins the House wins it with a solid popular-vote majority -- even if the president is of the other party. Consider what happened when Democrats won control of the House during George W. Bush's second term. They prevailed in the 2006 elections by 6.4 million votes.

Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats did not just win control of the House in 2006, they won an overwhelming popular-vote mandate to challenge a sitting president of the other party.

John Boehner and House Republicans won no such mandate on November 6. In fact, they lost the popular vote, and with it the claim that President Obama -- who so overwhelmingly won the popular vote -- should bend to Boehner's belligerence.

In hopes of winning a presidential mandate in 2016, Republicans are attempting to gerrymander the electoral college. Check out Ari Berman's coverage here. 

John Nichols, a pioneering political blogger, has written the Online Beat since 1999. His posts have been circulated internationally, quoted in numerous books and mentioned in debates on the floor of Congress.


Nichols writes about politics for The Nation magazine as its Washington correspondent. He is a contributing writer for The Progressive and In These Times and the associate editor of the Capital Times, the daily newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune and dozens of other newspapers.


Nichols is a frequent guest on radio and television programs as a commentator on politics and media issues. He was featured in Robert Greenwald's documentary, "Outfoxed," and in the documentaries Joan Sekler's "Unprecedented," Matt Kohn's "Call It Democracy" and Robert Pappas' "Orwell Rolls in his Grave." The keynote speaker at the 2004 Congress of the International Federation of Journalists in Athens, Nichols has been a featured presenter at conventions, conferences and public forums on media issues sponsored by the Federal Communications Commission, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Consumers International, the Future of Music Coalition, the AFL-CIO, the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, the Newspaper Guild [CWA] and dozens of other organizations.


Nichols is the author of the upcoming book The Genius of Impeachment (The New Press), as well as a critically-acclaimed analysis of the Florida recount fight of 2000, Jews for Buchanan (The New Press) and a best-selling biography of Vice President Dick Cheney, Dick: The Man Who is President (The New Press), which has recently been published in French and Arabic. He edited Against the Beast: A Documentary History of American Opposition to Empire (Nation Books), of which historian Howard Zinn said: "At exactly the time when we need it most, John Nichols gives us a special gift--a collection of writings, speeches, poems, and songs from throughout American history--that reminds us that our revulsion to war and empire has a long and noble tradition in this country."


With Robert W. McChesney, Nichols has co-authored the books, It's the Media, Stupid! (Seven Stories), Our Media, Not Theirs (Seven Stories) and Tragedy and Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy (The New Press). McChesney and Nichols are the co-founders of Free Press, the nation's media-reform network, which organized the 2003 and 2005 National Conferences on Media Reform.


Of Nichols, author Gore Vidal says: "Of all the giant slayers now afoot in the great American desert, John Nichols's sword is the sharpest."