This Is Not Governing

A look at the fully dysfunctional Republican House of Representatives.

Last night, Democrat Tom Suozzi won the special election for New York’s third Congressional district. This was the seat formerly held by George Santos.

Exit polling showed various reasons for the Republican defeat: 

Mazi Pilip, the Republican candidate, struggled to find consistent answers to abortion questions during debates. She would claim that she was pro-life only to later say that abortion was a personal choice. Pilip wouldn’t be the first nor will she be the last Republican to lose their race due to abortion issues as it has become a major driver of Democrat votes since the overturning of Roe v Wade.

Immigration was another significant topic. Pilip accused Suozzi of being in favor of open borders and called him “Sanctuary Suozzi”. Suozzi deftly handled the issue by fully admitting there is an immigration problem and then focusing on how Republicans were blocking efforts to fix it. 

Both of those issues are going to be difficult for Republicans to overcome this fall. But there was another overarching issue that some voters referred to as a deciding factor: Republican Dysfunction.

If House Republicans think America isn’t noticing how poorly they are governing with their majority, they’re wrong.

Republicans gained the majority in the House of Representatives with the 2022 midterm elections. Immediately it was clear that this wasn’t going to go well. MAGA Representatives were determined to make governing difficult. 

The first display of this dysfunction was voting for the Speaker of the House. It took 15 rounds of voting to elect Kevin McCarthy as Speaker. One of the concessions that had to be made to secure the vote was making it easy for a single member of the House to initiate a vote of no confidence to remove the Speaker of the House. From the beginning, MAGA members like Matt Gaetz threatened to do exactly that every time he was unhappy.

Another common tactic was threatening to shut down the government. Republicans made the threat over the debt ceiling, the budget, immigration, and any other policy where they wanted to bully their minority position into bills.

When Kevin McCarthy worked with the President and Democrats at the 11th hour to solve the debt ceiling instead of allowing a shutdown to occur, Matt Gaetz made good on his previous threats and initiated a vote to oust the Speaker.

It seemed that Gaetz was expecting that Democrats might step in to save the Speaker given that Congress was up against the deadline for the 2024 budget. A move that would have allowed MAGA politicians to further their narrative that Congress is really made up of a uniparty of Democrats and Republicans, whereas MAGA are the mavericks attempting to disrupt the system and drain the swamp. But Gaetz miscalculated and Democrats joined a handful of Republicans in ousting Kevin McCarthy. 

The in-fighting and anger was so great over the removal that the House took a vacation to cool off before returning and undertaking a round robin of various candidates for Speaker with candidate after candidate failing to be able to find a majority of support.

Eventually Speaker Johnson was voted in as the new Speaker. Shortly there after, Kevin McCarthy announced his retirement at the end of 2023. In December George Santos was also voted out of Congress due to a list of ethical issues. Both of these reduced the small Republican majority, making it that much harder for Republicans to push through their agenda.

All of that was only the tip of the dysfunctional iceberg.

The 118th Republican majority House of Representatives had over 700 votes last year but passed fewer than 30 laws. This has made them the least productive House of Representatives since the Great Depression. For everyone in the US who is under the age of 80, that makes this House the worst of our lifetime. 

It isn’t an issue of a divided Congress. The first session of the 116th Congress had a Democrat House, a Republican Senate and a Republican President, the exact inverse of the first session of the 118th. You can see by the chart below the difference in their performance.

This stark difference is due to the fact that MAGA Republicans have insisted on voting on issues such as trying to defund federal organizations, to reduce government official salaries to 0, to start impeachments on anyone they can think of, and to bring up extreme bills such as the Parents Bill of Rights that they know will never get traction in the Senate.

They want to govern based on what gives them the best sound bites and tweets, not what will solve problems and enable progress. It doesn’t matter how many times their own votes fail, clearly.

This is the reason why so many members have been spending all of their time on an impeachment inquiry into President Biden that has yielded zero results and no evidence of any wrongdoing by the President. Yet they continue for the sound bites.

Even just last week Republicans failed two votes in the same day. The first was the initial impeachment attempt against Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas where Republicans miscounted their votes, a very inexperienced type of mistake, and the second was a vote on aid to Israel in an attempt to undermine the Senate’s bipartisan aid bill.

When these failures happen, Republicans are quick to blame Democrats.

Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed that Democrats were “hiding members” because Al Green was at the hospital but rushed back, still in the hospital gown, to cast his vote. That isn’t Democrats hiding votes, it is Republicans being shady by trying to pass a tough vote while opposing members are supposed to be having surgery.

And Speaker Johnson blamed Democrats for stopping his rushed Israel aid bill. But as the Speaker of the House it is his responsibility to plan legislation carefully and make sure he has the votes before bringing it to the floor.

This week the Republicans again voted to impeach Mayorkas. They managed to succeed by a single vote. It is a near certainty that the Senate will end this impeachment quickly without any action against Mayorkas making it a complete waste of everyone’s time. But it did create sound bites and tweets.

Mayorkas is not guilty of any crime. There were no laws that weren’t being enforced. He was impeached over policy differences. Policies that Republicans refuse to change as it would require working across the aisle to legislate solutions.

The impeachment doesn’t change the border or any of the factors surrounding it. And yet that is what Republicans spent their time on while calling a bipartisan border bill dead on arrival before they even read it.

This strategy is backfiring on Republicans in a big way. On social media you routinely see Republican voters blasting politicians for not solving issues that the GOP is complaining about. “Then do something!” is a common theme in replies.

When you run on “draining the swamp” and defeating the “deep state” only to then get into office to obstruct every bill, attempt to shut down the government at every turn, and lose out to Democratic maneuvering in each battle, people notice.

When you spend years fear mongering about the border by calling it a crisis, a national security risk, an invasion, and telling America that criminals and terrorists are flowing into our country only to then turn around and stop a bill that could fix it, voters shift the blame to you.

The American public has realized that Republicans cannot govern. That MAGA politicians are out for chaos, not legislating.

Republicans should start preparing for more election losses.