It’s not the red wave Republicans had envisioned, but it will allow the party to launch investigations into the Biden administration and block his agenda

Democratic Rep. Karen Bass overcame more than $100 million in spending by her rival Rick Caruso to win the Los Angeles mayor’s race, CNN projects, making history as the first woman and the first Black woman to serve as mayor.

Bass, who currently represents a Los Angeles-area House seat, was on Joe Biden’s shortlist for a running mate in the 2020 campaign.

She’s no stranger to making history: She previously served in the California State Assembly, where in 2008 she became the first Black woman to serve as speaker of a state legislature.

In her campaign, Bass emphasized the depth of her policy experience and her reputation as a collaborative listener and legislator. She also highlighted her early work as a physician assistant in the emergency room and her experience bringing together Black and Latino community organizers in South LA in the early 1990s to address the root causes of crime and the crack epidemic. She did that work through the nonprofit she founded, Community Coalition. 

Bass also highlighted her role as a dealmaker when she led the California State Assembly after the 2008 financial crisis – making budget decisions that earned her a John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award in 2010. She also made history in that role – becoming the first Black woman to serve as speaker of a state legislature in 2008. 

She argued that her experience would give her a unique perspective and understanding of the problems with homelessness in Los Angeles. She said her experience in the emergency room had given her a depth of understanding of the problem that her primary rivals, including Caruso, did not have. 

“I have a background in the medical field. I’ve worked with these patients,” she told CNN in an interview earlier this year. “I spent several years in the emergency room at (LA) county. My patients were homeless. My patients were mentally ill. They had substance abuse. I know these systems.” 

She said she would declare a state of emergency on homelessness that would set a new tone on addressing homelessness citywide: “It should be dealt with like a natural disaster,” she told CNN. “I’m really hoping that we begin to build a new spirit in this city, where people understand that this problem is everyone’s problem.”

President Joe Biden congratulated House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy on Republicans winning the House majority and said he is “ready to work with House Republicans to deliver results for working families.”

“Last week’s elections demonstrated the strength and resilience of American democracy,” a statement from the president said. “There was a strong rejection of election deniers, political violence, and intimidation. There was an emphatic statement that, in America, the will of the people prevails.”

The statement continued:

Winning the House majority, even with a smaller margin than they’d hoped, will give Republicans some newfound power to set the agenda when they take over the chamber in January.

House Republicans will have subpoena power in the majority and control over powerful committees — and they plan to make investigations into the Biden administration a top priority.

On the legislative front, there will be some must-pass policy issues — like funding the government — that will test the ability of Republicans and Democrats to work together.

Here’s a look at some of their plans:

Investigations: House Republicans are eyeing potential probes into everything from the chaotic pullout from Afghanistan, border policies being overseen by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, business dealings involving President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, and the bureaucratic decision-making behind Covid-related school closures and vaccine mandates.

House Republicans may also use their majority to push a counter-narrative around the Jan. 6, 2021, attack in an attempt to shift blame away from former President Donald Trump after a violent mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol.

Even before the party clinched the House majority, some of the investigative groundwork laid out by Republican officials had started to come to fruition. A federal judge in Louisiana on Monday, for instance, ordered an FBI cybersecurity official to be deposed in a lawsuit alleging that the FBI coerced social media companies to block stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop ahead of the 2020 election.

The FBI deposition is one of several sought by the state Republican officials in a lawsuit accusing Biden officials of effectively enforcing government censorship by pushing social media companies to, among other things, police speech about the origins of the virus that causes Covid-19, the efficacy of face masks and health care measures intended to curb the spread of the virus, as well as claims about election integrity and the security of voting by mail.

It’s not yet clear how far House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy is willing to go when it comes to January 6 and the 2020 presidential election. And some Republicans argue that the party would be better served by moving past 2020.

GOP legislative agenda amid narrow majority: The president can exercise veto power over legislation, but House Republicans will still be able to push some messaging bills that highlight their agenda.

In an exclusive, wide-ranging interview with CNN, two days before the midterm elections, McCarthy outlined his plans for power, which includes tackling inflation, rising crime and border security — three issues that have become central to Republicans’ closing pitch to voters.

McCarthy also left the door open to launching eventual impeachment proceedings, which some of his members have already begun to call for.

During a private intraparty meeting on Monday ahead of leadership elections, McCarthy promised he would strip power from Democrats, vowing to kick Minnesota Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar off the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and California Reps. Eric Swalwell and Adam Schiff off the House Intelligence Committee, according to a source in the room.

But Republicans’ slim majority will stand in the way of most – if not all — of their priorities in the chamber.

McCarthy’s allies have recently attempted to convince moderate Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas to switch parties in hopes of padding their slim margins, according to two sources familiar with the conversation. Cuellar flatly rejected the idea.

Republicans will win control of the House, CNN projects, and with that majority comes the power of committees and influence to set the agenda, which will make things much harder for the Biden administration in the next two years.

The GOP has won the 218 seats necessary to claim the majority, according to CNN projections, and Democrats will have a narrow majority in the Senate.

CNN chief congressional correspondent Manu Raju explained why winning control of the House is significant for Republicans. 

Additionally, Kevin McCarthy, who won his party’s nomination for speaker of the House, and the rest of GOP leadership will be able to set the exact schedule for what they want to bring to the floor. They can also refuse to bring measures up and set priorities that align with their party’s agenda, Raju added.

In the first two years of President Joe Biden’s term, Democrats held a narrow majority in both the House and Senate. This allowed them to pass some significant bills strictly along party lines, like the Inflation Reduction Act, for example, Raju explained.

“They will no longer be able to do that, because in order to move through the budget process, you need support within… essentially among your party, and Republicans and Democrats would not agree to move in such sweeping legislation like that,” Raju said in his analysis, adding that any legislation that passes now will have to be incremental.

WATCH: Manu Raju explains what the GOP taking control of the House means

Republicans will win control of the House of Representatives, CNN projects, reaching the threshold of 218 seats needed for a majority in the chamber after Republican Mike Garcia won in California’s 27th Congressional District.

The victory will fall short of their hopes of a “red wave” but thwart President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda and will likely subject his White House to relentless investigations.

The fact that the GOP finally passed the threshold of 218 seats needed for control of the chamber eight days after Election Day – and that it came down to the final districts to report results – underscores the party’s underwhelming midterm election performance, which history and political logic suggested should have delivered a heftier rebuke to Biden and Democrats.

In defiance of political gravity, Democrats held onto the Senate after an election dominated by concerns about high inflation and influenced, in some places, by the Supreme Court’s overturning of a constitutional right to abortion this summer. There’s still an outstanding Senate race in Georgia, which will be decided by a December runoff and will determine how large the Democrats’ majority will be.

Republicans’ victory in the House will end Democrat Nancy Pelosi’s second tenure as speaker in January. But its majority looks set to number a handful of seats, far short of initial expectations in a margin that will make managing a restive Republican conference a stiff task for party leaders.

And while less impressive than party leaders had hoped for, it still represents a return of Trump-style ideology and chaos politics to Washington, given the strong influence the ex-president is likely to wield over his acolytes in the GOP conference. The former president announced his 2024 presidential bid on Tuesday night.

Republican Rep. Mike Garcia will in California’s 27 District, CNN projects, helping the GOP reach the 218 seats necessary to gain control of the House.

After Maine’s ranked-choice tabulation, Rep. Jared Golden will win in the state’s 2nd Congressional District, CNN projects, defeating Republican Bruce Poliquin in a rematch of their 2018 contest for the same seat. This is a Democratic hold.

Here’s where things stand in the House:

Republicans need to win one more race to reach the 218 seats necessary to gain control of the House.

The $122 million-dollar Los Angeles mayor’s race between US Rep. Karen Bass and real estate magnate Rick Caruso is still too close to call, along with six House races in California that could determine the balance of power in Washington, raising a perennial question: Why does it take California so long to count its votes?

More than a week after Election Day and as the nation awaits an official call on which party will control the US House of Representatives, attention is turning to some of the outstanding races in California that could tip the scales. Tuesday was the last day that county election officials could accept ballots that were postmarked on or before Election Day — meaning the Golden State is just getting started counting some of those late-arriving ballots.

California now mails every registered voter a ballot, a practice that began in 2020 amid the Covid-19 pandemic and ultimately became permanent in Sept. 2021 in an effort to increase voter access and participation. Under state law, ballots postmarked on or before Election Day must be accepted by county elections offices for seven days after polls close.

The sheer volume of ballots that election officials are now counting is enormous. In the 2020 election, more than 15 million mail ballots were cast in the general election – comprising about 87% of the total. This year, there were nearly 22 million registered California voters by mid-October, according to figures from the California secretary of state.

The official canvassing period — the process of tabulating votes — will continue up to Dec. 8, when county election officials must report their final official results to the secretary of state (though some counties have set earlier deadlines to certify their own election results). The California secretary of state will certify the state’s results by Dec. 16.

Keep reading here.

Former Vice President Mike Pence told CBS News that he is “closing the door” on testifying before the House Select Committee investigating Jan. 6, putting an end to the question of whether he would agree to speak with the committee before it wraps its investigation. 

“I am closing the door on that, but I must say again, the partisan nature of the Jan. 6 committee has been a disappointment to me,” Pence said.  

Pence criticized the makeup of the committee, ignoring the fact that Republicans rejected earlier opportunities to form the panel in a more bipartisan fashion, but acknowledged that he did not stand in the way of members of his senior staff, including his chief of staff Marc Short, from testifying in front of the panel. 

“It’s inconceivable to me that one party would appoint every member of a committee in Congress that’s antithetical to the whole idea of the committee system,” Pence said. 

He continued, “We have a separation of powers under the Constitution of the United States. And I believe it would establish a terrible precedent for the Congress to summon a Vice President of the United States to speak about deliberations that took place at the White House.”

Pence said even though he does not want to testify before the committee, he would continue to share his story about what happened on Jan. 6 in his book and he will “continue to speak openly about it.”

CNN has previously reported that Pence’s legal counsel had been in communication with the committee about whether he would testify. Over the summer, the panel dedicated an entire hearing to the pressure campaign Pence faced in the lead-up to Capitol attack, which included testimony from some of his top aides.

GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a member of the committee, was quick to criticize Pence’s decision not to testify.

“Hey Pence, do you like Democracy or nah? Did trump break the law or nah? Pick a lane and a position. You will fail to please everyone” Kinzinger tweeted.

Pence will participate in a CNN town hall airing at 9:00 p.m. ET tonight.