The disastrously unproductive first year of Republican House rule keeps making headlines. That’s partly because some of the people who created all the chaos are publicly complaining to the press that they’re getting nothing done while refusing to allow any real work to progress. The leopards eating faces are lamenting the “embarrassing” results of face eating, but keep on chowing down.
Take Freedom Caucus member Rep. Andy Biggs from Arizona. He was one of the eight who voted to oust former Speaker Kevin McCarthy. “We have nothing,” he said in a recent Newsmax interview, reported by NBC. “In my opinion, we have nothing to go out there and campaign on. It’s embarrassing.”
That’s the same lament another Freedom Caucus member, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, made on the House floor late last year. “One thing. I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing,” Roy yelled on the House floor on Wednesday. “One. That I can go campaign on and say we did. One!” Roy told NBC that he stands by that rant “because nothing’s been delivered yet—no final product.” Roy has been one of the handful of hard-liners who keep shutting the House down by bucking leadership on procedural votes.
They are right. The House has done nothing beyond the bare minimum of keeping the government running and is likely to achieve little else going forward because of the likes of Biggs and Roy as well as new Speaker Mike Johnson. He’s backing them up on obstructing the Senate’s bipartisan efforts on the immigration policy/Ukraine aid bill, for example.
Congress also has a solid potential win with a bipartisan tax bill that gives working families with young children additional help, but also provides some tax breaks to businesses that all Republicans should love. It sailed through committee last week, but some Republicans are already fighting each other over what’s not in the bill, and over the fact that they were shut out of the bill-making process.
“[House Ways and Means Chair] Jason Smith has failed miserably,” a GOP member of the bipartisan SALT Caucus told Semafor, referring to the current chair of the House Ways and Means Committee. “His ears are closed and his mind is closed.” The member added that Smith had “starved fellow House Republicans” of information as the bill was negotiated, and stated their personal opposition to the legislation as long as it didn’t raise the current $10,000 SALT cap.
Everybody on the House Republican side is grumpy with everybody else, all the while lamenting that they can’t get anything done because of those other Republicans. Even Senate Republicans are getting in on the grievance-airing. “It would be ironic if the thing that prevented them from being able to hang their hat on a good immigration or border security policy would be the election because it could be the only thing that might save some of them,” GOP Sen. Cramer of North Dakota told NBC. “The whole ‘burden of governing’ thing that I was hopeful would weigh heavily enough on them to get serious hasn’t worked so far.”
None of this hand-wringing over lack of accomplishments is stopping the hard-liners—or anyone else in the GOP— from openly talking about whether or not they should oust Johnson as speaker, and his bleak future if he does manage to keep the job. “I don’t think he’s safe right now,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia told Politico, adding: “The only reason he’s speaker is because our conference is so desperate.”
From the other side of the GOP divide, Rep. Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, the interim speaker after McCarthy’s ouster, warned last week that “we’re sucking wind” with Johnson at the helm.
All of this guarantees that Republicans are going to be spending this year eating each other’s faces instead of accomplishing anything.
Republished with permission from Daily Kos.
