The House GOP has an excuse for being nearly halfway through their first 100 days—always a big landmark new congressional majorities tout—and having almost nothing to show for it, and it’s not that they had to take more than half of February off. Which they’re doing, by the way, right now.
“It is not, to me, advantageous for Congress to be doing a lot, but to be doing less and doing it well,” said Rep. Chip Roy. Yes, the first six weeks of a House GOP majority has been a master class in doing the Congress thing.
“We’ve passed meaningful bills our folks care about while we are getting prepared for what is obviously the important spending debate,” he said. Those meaningful bills include letting rich people get away with cheating on their taxes and setting down the marker that a national abortion ban is their ultimate goal. Additionally, Roy says, “we are laying down markers on that. That takes a lot of time and thinking.” They’re thinking folks, and it takes a lot of time for this crew to think.
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Over on the other side of Capitol Hill, the Senate GOP hasn’t unified behind whether it’s a good thing that they’re off to a slow start (caused pretty much entirely by foot-dragging in making committee assignments in the GOP) or a sign that Democrats are in disarray. They’re trying to have it both ways, mostly. “This is probably one of the slowest starts in memory for the Senate,” Sen. John Barrasso told The Washington Post Thursday. “I actually appreciate this go-slow approach,” Sen. Cynthia Lummis, his Wyoming colleague, told Politico. “It’s time to slow down.”
The reality is, the House GOP majority got off to a very rocky start. It took nearly five days and 15 votes for Barely Speaker Kevin McCarthy to finally get the seat—nothing could be done until the speaker was elected. In relatively short order, they got a big rules package through that included a bunch of bills they were supposed to bring to the floor immediately. They’ve done roughly half of them, and still haven’t held votes on a forced birth bill, an anti-immigration bill, and a couple of crime bills.
If McCarthy had the votes to do those things, they’d have been done. They have an explanation for that, too. “There’s a demand for regular order on major agenda items, so it’s just going to take time,” Rep. Dan Crenshaw told the Post. In other words, McCarthy and team don’t have the votes to take something to the floor and pass it. It has to go through committee first.
The mess the House GOP is in gives Senate Democrats a chance to have some fun at their expense while justifying a slow start on coming up with any legislative efforts. “I think there’s understandable you-go-first dynamics happening. So I think there’s a bunch of potential bipartisan conversations that could happen here,” Sen. Chris Murphy said. “But until there’s some—some—smoke signals from the House as to whether they’re going to be a 100 percent dumpster fire, or only an 80 percent dumpster fire, there’s a reluctance to get things moving.”
There might be a small bit of method in the House GOP slow-walking the decision, including the 18-day break from D.C. they’re currently enjoying. It almost certainly rules out Democrats joining with a handful of responsible Republicans to get the 218 votes necessary to push a discharge petition on a bill to raise the debt ceiling without any poison pills. That’s the only way the minority can get a bill onto the floor, but it takes a lot of time: 30 legislative days in committee and then a minimum of nine legislative days to get to the floor. That’s three or four months of regular time.
It’s giving McCarthy and team a lot of credit to imagine that they’ve figured that out and have made it part of their plan. It’s a lot more likely that they really don’t care about trying to be there for legislative work. All they really want is to have plenty of chances for Jim Jordan to yell at Democrats.
Sarah Longwell is a longtime Republican strategist and prominent never-Trumper. Her podcast, The Focus Group, is a peek at the thousands of hours of focus groups she has conducted all across the country. Sarah comes on to give her thoughts about the state of the current Republican Party and why its future remains bleak.
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