In what was officially just the 12th day in session for the new House Republican majority, the wheels have come off the GOP vote-counting machinery.
There were just two bills schedule for floor action yesterday, both under suspension of the rules, meaning they were thought to be non-controversial enough to pass with the required 2/3 majority. Neither one made it. The USA PATRIOT Act renewal went down, seven votes short. And the Trade Adjustment Assistance extension bill never even made it to the floor, pulled by the Republican leadership as they realized they didn't have the votes for that one, either.
Now, it should perhaps be expected that there would be a few kinks in the transition, but seriously, it's not like the Republican whip operation had to be rebuilt from the ground up. The former Minority Whip is now the Majority Leader. He didn't go anywhere. And the current Majority Whip, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA-22) comes to the job from having been the Chief Deputy Whip. So there's no excuse there. It's just a straight-up failure to count votes correctly.
Or perhaps more likely, it's a failure to even bother to count them at all. Let's face it, during the four years Republicans spent out of power in the House, the daily strategy was simple and obvious: oppose everything the Democrats brought to the floor. It might well be the case that Republicans haven't had to count votes for years now, and the rust on the gears is now quite plainly obvious. Republicans approached their daily work for the past four years as though they had no responsibility for governing. And now that the elections have ostensibly put that item back into their job description, they find rather quickly that they've forgotten how to do it -- if they ever even knew, that is. Consider how subservient the last Republican Congress was to the then-Republican White House.
Having the day's entire legislative agenda collapse on Day 12 of a brand new Congress is a pretty grievous error. Imagine what the impact might have been had the party that had been out of power for four years had actually had a substantive legislative agenda they were pursuing right out of the gate, now that the opportunity had been given them! But thankfully, it was only the matters of national security and jobs.
Whew!