By Annie Karni
Rep. Chip Roy, the far-right Texas Republican and reigning king of the fervid floor speech, stood before the House last November and tore into his party.
“I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing, one, that I can go campaign on and say we did. One!” He pressed someone — anyone! — to “come explain to me one material, meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done.”
It was not a helpful sound bite for his colleagues, but Roy had a point. After nearly 11 months in control, House Republicans had little to show for themselves beyond ousting their first speaker, Kevin McCarthy, and then making life miserable for his successor, Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., who won the job only because exhausted Republicans saw him as a compromise who had yet to offend any of the party’s warring tribes.
The party’s record has not grown more productive since Roy’s eviscerating speech.
On Wednesday, Johnson was forced to once again rely on Democrats to provide the bulk of votes to pass a stopgap spending bill in order to avert a government shutdown just weeks before the 2024 election. The bill passed in a lopsided vote of 341-82, with the majority of Republicans supporting it.
It left Johnson politically wounded in the eyes of his far-right members, who wanted to include in any agreement steep spending cuts and a measure requiring proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote.
With those goals scuttled, lawmakers scrambled to the airports with no plans to return to Washington until after the November election.
As they head home to make the case to voters for why they deserve to keep their dysfunctional House majority, Republicans have little to point to in terms of accomplishments. Must-pass legislation like raising the debt ceiling and spending bills to avoid ever-looming government shutdowns moved forward slowly, and only because Democrats supplied most of the votes to pass those bills.
Their investigations into the Biden family failed to implicate the only Biden who mattered, the one who is the sitting president, and did not result in the impeachment many promised their voters two years ago on the campaign trail. Their inquiries became moot anyway, after President Joe Biden said in July that he would not seek reelection.
Since rising to the speakership last October, Johnson has had to look over his shoulder and take into account what former President Donald Trump and the Make America Great Again members in his conference demand. But those dictates often end up dividing Republican lawmakers, leading to failed votes, muddled messaging and internal power battles that have left Democrats more optimistic about recapturing control of the House in November.
“There is not an especially strong legislative record for them to run on,” said Molly Reynolds, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution.
Consumed by intraparty warfare and personal disputes, Republicans have over and over again stood in the way of their own partisan messaging bills, blocking them from receiving votes on the floor. At various points over the past two years, GOP lawmakers have compared their own divided conference to a clown car. Some of them even tried a second time to jettison their own leader, moving unsuccessfully to oust Johnson from the role. He survived only because Democrats moved to save him when funding for Ukraine was at stake.
“The picture that comes across to voters who pay attention is that Republicans in Congress care more about fighting among themselves than getting things done for the American people,” said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster working for Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign. “The party is seen as being at the mercy of its extreme MAGA wing.”
There have been moments when the House got its act together to pass critical legislation — but then a conservative-led House majority often ended up fracturing the vote and delivering a Democratic agenda. When it came to extending an expiring warrantless surveillance law that national security officials say is critical to gathering intelligence and fighting terrorism, right-wing House Republicans blocked it after Trump urged them, in all caps on social media, to kill the bill. Johnson was able to move the bill forward after shortening the extension to two years from five.
Among the few other major pieces of legislation the House has passed, outside of its constitutional obligations to approve spending bills, was a $95 billion foreign aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. But after a long delay in bringing the bill to the floor, the vast majority of Republicans voted against the Ukraine portion of the bill, too.
In a tribal moment in politics, the results of the upcoming House elections may have little to do with the congressional dysfunction of the past two years. The electoral focus for many voters is much more on the ideological differences between the parties on the issues they care about.
“‘Do voters care about individual accomplishments of a given Congress’ is a much harder question to answer,” Reynolds said. “So much of what happens in our congressional races is just driven by big partisan forces.”
And lawmakers benefit from the bar being very low: For years, the vast majority of voters have said they hold a dim view of Congress and think it is already broken, according to polls. That was true long before Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., led the charge to oust McCarthy less than a year ago.
“House Republicans have fought hard here,” Johnson told reporters Wednesday night. “You have all seen it. You watched it day by day, to secure the border, protect American elections from noncitizen voting, to protect Americans from criminals, to combat the Biden-Harris anti-American energy agenda, to counter China, Iran and Russia, and we have conducted crucial oversight.”
There are still outstanding issues Republicans have yet to address, like the farm bill, and the looming problem of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s major disaster aid program, which is in need of more money by the end of the year. Republicans also failed at priorities they set for themselves, like completing individual appropriations bills before the deadline.
On Tuesday afternoon, perhaps not wanting to further jeopardize the electoral chances of his more vulnerable colleagues, Roy was eating his own words from last year.
“There’s a lot of things we’ve been able to do when we unify,” he said when asked whether he still thought Republicans had no accomplishments to speak of. “What we have done is hold nondefense spending flat. We have been able to center the focus on border security in a way that the American people can understand what we stand for.”
Roy noted that Republicans recently passed a bill to impose sweeping sanctions on officials at the International Criminal Court, a rebuke of efforts by the court’s top prosecutor to charge top Israeli leaders with war crimes.
Not everyone was able to rattle off achievements they were proud of. Rep. María Elvira Salazar, a vulnerable Republican from Florida, would not answer when asked what she had to tell voters back home about Republican achievements in Congress over the past two years. At first, she told a reporter to wait for her outside the House chamber to chat after votes. But then she was out of time. “I have to run to a fundraiser,” she said, promising that a staff member would get in contact with a full answer to the question.
No answer ever came.
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