Republicans Broke the House—Will Voters Care?
The failed, the weird, and the ugly.
FIFTEEN ROUNDS OF VOTING to make Kevin McCarthy speaker in January of last year was not enough of an international embarrassment. Just nine months later, McCarthy was toppled, and the House of Representatives ground to a halt as the Republicans scrounged around for someone to serve third in line to the presidency. They needed an election denier who would meet with approval from Matt Gaetz, the fourth-term congressman who had led both revolts against McCarthy in January and September. It took three weeks.
House Speaker Mike Johnson made it less than nine months before his job was also challenged; last week, 163 Democrats voted to ensure he could keep it. Marjorie Taylor Greene was roundly criticized by her fellow Republicans for using the motion to vacate to try and oust Johnson—Donald Trump and most of them have decided now is not the time to dump Johnson because they have already inflicted enough political damage for an election year. Even so, Johnson still needed the Democrats’ votes, which is the story of the entire 118th Congress.
In addition to being the least productive Congress in our lifetime, the stain this Republican majority has left on the lower chamber will make history. Controlled by a rump group of whiners and drama queens, it has functioned only with the good faith of the minority, the enemy—Democrats. Throughout nearly eighteen months of chronic chaos, infighting, and gridlock, on every consequential bill—from funding the government to raising the debt ceiling to FISA reform and foreign aid—Democrats have provided votes when Republican leaders didn’t have them.
At every turn the Democrats could have sat on their hands and let McCarthy and Johnson and their Cannibal Caucus own it. But every time they instead stepped in to clean up a mess.
The Republican nihilists have repeatedly refused to cooperate or compromise on critical legislation, then lambasted their leaders as the “uniparty” for relying on votes from the Democrats. The dysfunction and corresponding bitterness have produced not only recriminations but retirements and resignations, thinning the GOP ranks to a one-seat margin of control.
Of the twenty-two Republicans who have announced their departures, five of them have already left, unwilling to stick it out until the election. The total number includes four committee chairs, eight subcommittee chairs, and eight members of the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee.
OF COURSE, WHILE MANY House Republicans have grown to loathe one another, and the responsibility of governing, their organizing principle is Democrat-hate.
There is no one in either party who thinks Republicans would ever do the same to help Hakeem Jeffries or any Democrat keep the speaker’s gavel. The GOP base would never allow it.
Indeed, the bipartisan display in support of governing stability on the House floor last week was just too much for Eric Burlison. The first-term Republican from Missouri voted with Greene against tabling the motion to vacate because while he said he didn’t feel it was the right time to oust another speaker and it might be hard to find a new one, he admitted “I just could not stomach voting with Democrats to avoid a vote.”
Johnson tried to pretend the vote to table Greene’s motion would usher in a new beginning, and somehow the tantrums would cease.
“Hopefully this is the end of the personality politics and the frivolous character assassination that has defined the 118th Congress. It’s regrettable, it’s not who we are as Americans, and we’re better than this. We need to get beyond it,” Johnson said after the vote.
Yes Mr. Speaker, this is not who we are as Americans, because we are all better than the House GOP conference.
WHILE HOUSE REPUBLICANS are explicitly contemptuous of governing—they brought down so many of their own rules this Congress they broke a more than twenty-year record—many seem to believe the role of the majority is to campaign for Trump.
After failing, through more than a year of investigations and hearings into multiple members of the Biden family, to locate any evidence of an impeachable offense they could pin on President Joe Biden, some House Republicans now want to impeach him for shifting his Israel policy.
Using the same language Democrats used in their resolution when they impeached Trump for attempting to extort the president of Ukraine back in 2019, Republicans accused Biden of abusing his power by soliciting a “quid pro quo” in withholding certain weapons from the Israelis to use in Rafah. What the “quid” was—what Biden supposedly got in exchange for withholding bombs—is not something the Republicans are especially clear about, but that’s not the point when you’re fundraising and trying to get on Newsmax.
Rep. Jim Jordan, who in the evolving MAGA-GOP is now considered future speaker material, decided last week he wants Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s ex-boyfriend Nathan Wade to come testify before Congress—after the relationship already tanked any prospect of this case coming to trial before the election.
“There are serious concerns about your role in the politically motivated prosecution initiated by Ms. Willis against President Donald J. Trump,” Jordan wrote, inviting Wade to speak voluntarily to the Judiciary Committee.
It’s easy to laugh, and some of the GOP’s own voters must also find this effort ludicrous, but Republicans’ disregard for any responsibility to the American people and the multitude of issues the Congress could be working on to help them is breathtaking.
When they aren’t being partisan, or brawling with their own colleagues, some House Republicans just get weird. They like to focus on things that don’t exist—like ghost buses or sharia law being forced upon Americans.
And when they’re not being weird, some of them can get ugly.
Mike Collins thinks he’s a pretty funny tweeter, and a week after praising Ole Miss students in a video where one can be seen taunting a black woman, he made fun of members of the Kennedy family being assassinated.
Chip Roy came out with it last week: He just doesn’t want “foreign-born” immigrants having too many citizen children in the United States.
Scott Perry believes we are “importing people” who want to come to America but “have no interest in being Americans.” He wants his colleagues to know that replacement theory is real and that “they added ‘white’ to it to stop everybody from talking about it.” Perry, an eager participant on Team Coup in 2020, also believes that the KKK is the “military wing of the Democratic party.”
Throughout, Democrats have been united, and under Jeffries’s leadership, they have shown remarkable restraint. Despite internal disagreements, particularly on the war in Gaza, no Democratic family fights have broken out into the open.
It makes sense that Democrats are outraising Republicans; it must be demoralizing to fund the GOP shitshow. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee hauled in $45.4 million in the first quarter this year, $21.4 million of which was raised in March, leaving the DCCC with $71.1 million, $15 million more than the National Republican Congressional Committee.
Yet to date, there is no evidence of voter backlash against House Republicans, who have led the general ballot in polling several times this cycle. Democrats are ahead now only slightly, by 0.7 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight.
Unlike the Senate, where the map favors a Republican takeover, the race for the House is a coin toss. The House GOP is begging to lose their majority. Instead of more power, many of them are in need of professional help. Voters should heed their call.