House GOP — The Chaos & Dysfunction Party
In 2023, Congress enacted a total of just 27 bills, the fewest since 1932.
There are various reasons why Congress took 724 votes in 2023 but ended with its least productive session in more than 90 years.
At the heart of the problem, however, is the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and the stranglehold on Republicans exercised by some three dozen ideological extremists, operating as the House Freedom Caucus – a/k/a the “Just Say No” Caucus.
At some point in this century, House Republicans and Democrats retreated to their respective camps and abandoned any semblance of bipartisan efforts to pass legislation.
In the area I have worked in for many years – campaign finance and other democracy reforms – the pivotal moment was January 2010, when the Supreme Court issued the Citizens United decision and declared the ban on corporate campaign expenditures unconstitutional.
Prior to that, there were decades in which there was bipartisan leadership and bipartisan support for campaign finance and other political reforms – including the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act in 2002 and the Voting Rights Act Reauthorization in 2006.
In 2000, for example, Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support – 385-39 in the House and 92-6 in the Senate – passed legislation closing a major loophole in the campaign finance disclosure laws.
But, in 2010, following the Citizens United decision, the DISCLOSE Act, a similar loophole-closing campaign finance disclosure law, passed the House, with only two House Republicans voting for it. The Senate ultimately blocked the legislation by a filibuster – with no Republican Senators supporting the bill.
Since then, congressional Republicans have refused to support serious democracy reforms, including an extension of the Voting Rights Act, which they previously had supported for decades, and the Freedom to Vote Act.
That has been the general legislative pattern for the past decade, depending on who controlled the House.
But we have never seen anything like what unfolded in the Republican-controlled House in 2023.
The Freedom Caucus – a small minority of House ideologues – took over the institution, exercising outsized power over both the selection and removal of the House Speaker and the House legislative agenda, grinding it to a halt.
The Freedom Caucus’s crippling control of House Republicans and the legislative agenda occurred because, with such a slim overall Republican majority, their small number of votes was decisive, as the majority of House Republicans refused to seek compromise with Democrats on legislation.
The anti-government, extremist Freedom Caucus paralyzed the House and created chaos in Congress.
The ideologues also have exercised outsized power in choosing and removing Speakers.
Right from the outset of the 118th Congress last January, the extremists forced 15 votes before they allowed Kevin McCarthy to be elected Speaker, obtaining various concessions from McCarthy in the process, including one that ultimately proved fatal for his Speakership.
That concession involved McCarthy agreeing to continue the provision that allowed one Representative to force a vote to remove a Speaker from office. In October, a Freedom Caucus member forced this vote and McCarthy was ousted as Speaker when some Freedom Caucus members failed to vote for him and he could not get a majority of the House to support him.
House Republicans, looking like fumbling Keystone Cops, took four nominees and three weeks to elect Mike Johnson as the new Speaker.
Lo and behold, some Freedom Caucus members are now raising questions about removing Johnson – their own Freedom Caucus member – from his Speaker’s job.
The reality is that the Freedom Caucus’s far-right positions on a number of issues are out of touch with the country and do not have majority support in the House, in the Senate, or at the White House.
Meanwhile, unlike House Republicans, Senate Republicans have been willing to work with Democrats on some key issues.
Thus, Senate Republicans and Democrats recently reached bipartisan agreements on avoiding a government shutdown and on a key budget overall spending topline, are close to an agreement on a tax bill, and are working to achieve an agreement on immigration which would set up Senate passage of a supplemental bill to fund Ukraine and Israel and address our country’s immigration problem.
Immigration is perhaps the biggest campaign issue for Republicans and any number of House Republicans, including Freedom Caucus members, may want the political issue preserved rather than a legislative solution.
Here’s the bottom line: Some 180 House Republicans have allowed just three dozen Republican Members to control the House, resulting in dysfunction and chaos.
We will know soon enough whether the House Republican majority finally says “Basta!” to its extremist Members and begins to function as a legislative body focused on policy and the nation’s interests.
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Fred’s Weekly Note appears on Thursdays in Wertheimer’s Political Report, a Democracy 21 newsletter. Read this week’s and other recent newsletters here. And, subscribe for free here and receive your copy each week via email.
